What is the secret of your life, browsing ox,
Ox the sweet grass eating ?
Who strung the mighty sinews in your flesh ?
Who set that great heart beating ?
What is the secret of your death, soulless ox.
Ox so patiently waiting ?
Why hath pain wove her net for your brain's anguish ?
If for you Death will gain no life's creating ?
Night like purple flakes of snow
Falls with ease
Catching on the roofs of houses
In the tops of trees
Down upon the distant grass
And the distant flower
It will drift into this room
In an hour....
The stars that open and shut
Fall on my shallow breast
Like stars on a pool.
The soft wind, blowing cool
Laps little crest after crest
Of ripples across my breast.
And dark grass under my feet
Seems to dabble in me
Like grass in a brook.
Oh, and it is sweet
To be all these things, not to be
Any more myself.
For look,
I am weary of myself!
When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the
wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the
water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin's song, winsome,
Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one
flower
For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.
I long for the baby to wander hither to me
Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,
So that she can stand on my knee
With her little bare feet in my hands,
Cool like syringa buds,
Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.
This handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter
mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the
sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of
a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their
faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails
who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts;
these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as
feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I
turn my head and say good-by to no one who
hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.
Empty battlefields keep their phantoms.
Grass crawls over old gun wheels
And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple
Into the summer's southwest wind,
Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet,
Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel.
Wonder as of old things
Fresh and fair come back
Hangs over pasture and road.
Lush in the lowland grasses rise
And upland beckons to upland.
The great strong hills are humble.
Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers.
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face--
My naked arms--
My thighs--
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you,
For you to reach me, even,
With your tiny, timorous toes.
Tell me is there anything lovelier,
Anything more quieting
Than the green of little blades of grass
And the green of little leaves?
Is not each leaf a cool green hand,
Is not each blade of grass a mothering green finger,
Hushing the heart that beats and beats and beats?
The moon is cold over the sand-dunes.
And the clumps of sea-grasses flow and glitter ;
The thin chime of my watch tells the quarter after midnight ;
And still I hear nothing
But the windy beating of the sea.
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
In heaven,
Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
"What did you do?"
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind,
Ashamed.
Presently, God said,
"And what did you do?"
The little blade answered, "Oh my Lord,
Memory is bitter to me,
For, if I did good deeds,
I know not of them."
Then God, in all His splendor,