Les plus lus ▸
Edna St. Vincent Millay
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,--but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?
O ripples in the marshland grass
Like waves on an enchanted sea,
The winds, with trailing garments pass
Invisible adown the lea
Each footprint, evanescent, pressed
In shadowed highlight, trough and crest.
No spray upon those waves is seen
To splash upon the marshy bank;
Uncanny sea so strangely green!
While lurking in those coverts dank
What things of the abyss may dwell
Only the fear hushed winds might tell.
Far off where dunes aspiring melt
Into the sky, those currents flow
In turmoil neither heard nor felt
How furtively they come and go!
the last pig
hanging from the house
moon on the marsh
rainy day—
a rough reed touching
all the wind
lost
all morning in a marsh
the tower with us
Things against my going:
the rain, a great deal of paper,
the wind in the marsh. Oy.
I chose the saddest color
for a melancholy mother
and had a fear I should see
my house full of swords.
West wind on the marsh.
A general in the wars
out getting vines to pot.
in the heart of the country
we expect no ambassador
coming here is coming home to ore
and the ordinary feast
I am put in mind of a marsh with all
the all they name nothing in it
Before the mouth,
who owned me?
We set fire to the marsh
and to the swallow,
full of false Latin.
Our anchor is a salt-cellar.
At evening in the harbor,
horses run to the sea.
a light snow
a had been fallen
the brown most showed
knoll trunk knot treelings' U's
The Sound marsh water
ice clump
sparkling root etc
and so far out.
Floodtide sinks the sandbar.
Only waves faltering out of rhythm
show where it was.
Currents gnaw debris free from banks
for burial in the black mud of the marsh.
Idling in the pentacle of an old army tent
I would have the green heat speak
of why it flows so close under the earth,
making my shadow blur.
But the wind rising is enough, all afternoon
it has me
thinking what a wind thinks
miles past land.
our mind-sea foggy clear
hides its scaled creatures
twisting turning movies with their
jungle passions ancient times
crusaders’ flaming crosses
pitiless in ‘faith’
as much a part of me as this treed
half-raked lawn
you hide your armies images
wrapped in your bones
sharing that sea
an attic's cast-off
gowns and gestures where
so many loves and knives
lie buried
in this marsh teeming