Tanka 5
Though love has grown cold
The woods are bright with flowers,
Why not as of old
Go to the wildwood bowers
And dream of — bygone hours!
Poems on the topic: memory
Poems on the topic “memory” on Poets.by.
Minna IX
Sedate and archaic, a twilight-frilled haze
Walks over the meadows like rolled-out centuries
Quivering in sprightly welcome.
Trees pushed down by silence;
Trees lolling in comely abandon;
Trees pungently flamboyant,
Their leaves spinning in the wind’s golden elusiveness.
Trees probing the shrilly sensitive sunset
Like little, laced nightmares leaning
Upon a scarlet breast;
Trees sprinkling their stifled mockery
Upon the blue tomb of the air;
Trees, are you silenced beings
Whitening into the winding paradise
Of old loves seeking a second death?
And has this archaic, twilight-frilled haze
Minna VII
You have a morning-glory face
Whose edges are sensitive to light
And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.
Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory
And lattices its curves
With shades of golden reverberations.
Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves
Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.
To One Dead
I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me.
I stooped to question a flower,
And you floated between my fingers and the petals,
Tying them together.
I severed a leaf from its tree
And a water-drop in the green flagon
Cupped a hunted bit of your smile.
All things about me were steeped in your remembrance
And shivering as they tried to tell me of it.
Poet-Vagabond Grown Old
The dust of many roads has been my grey wine.
Surprised beech-trees have bowed
With me, to the plodding morning
Humming tunes frail as webs of dead perfume,
To his love in golden silks, the departed moon.
Maidens like rose-flooded statues
Have bathed me in the wine of their silence.
But now I walk on, alone.
And only after watching many evenings,
Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light,
To persuade myself that I am young.
Minna XV
Your arms, in faltering crescendos,
Wander through the room
Tinted with expectation of night.
The room seems a tottering tomb
Through which you roam with hands
Striving to press each form into the shape
Of someone buried beneath you....
Only when night sprays the room with his breath
Do you change to that which you seek.
Minna XIV
Sometimes jaded, sometimes tranquil,
Your eyes invade the tumult of your face.
Your lips are the remnants of a love
That made a sunset-cup of your face.
The movements of your body
Caress the couch you sit on into sound
That seems to answer your words.
You are restless because upon this couch
The cold touch of your lover lies
And seeps into you, reaching your heart.
Serenade
Dark is the iris meadow,
Dark is the ivory tower,
And lightly the young moth's shadow
Sleeps on the passion-flower.
Gone are our day's red roses.
So lovely and lost and few,
But the first star uncloses
A silver bud in the blue.
Night, and a flame in the embers
Where the seal of the years was set, —
When the almond-bough remembers
How shall my heart forget ?
The Clover Field
I left the crowded cities,
With their knowledge and their folly,
And wandered down the by-ways,
So lonely, wild and free.
But not for me the mountain
With its peak of purple grandeur,
The forest, or the desert,
Or the great unresting sea.
For in a homely valley
The air was sweet with honey,
And there the brown Earth-Mother
Held a clover field for me.
Heigh-ho! Earth's sweet, red clover
And the warmth and kindly healing!
I laid me down and listened
To the bee's deep, drowsy runes,
Wind
The Wind is a black-winged beast tonight.
I toss and shudder and long for light.
Oh cruel talons that grasp with might
My casement window — how frail it seems —
How it opened once to the moonlight gleams,
Rustle of leaves and the tiptoe dreams —
But now it is shutting a wild Thing out —
A winged beast in a mad death rout —
(Oh the great, black wings on-rushing!)
Was it the Wind that yesterday
Crooned so soft in the bent sea-pine?
Touching my lips like a pungent wine,
On the cliff top there, with the lichened turf
(Marriage of sea and of rich, brown earth).
Bayberry bushes of frosted green
Guarded that tryst of a king and queen.
Sea Lavender
My Puritan Grandmother! — I see her now,
With placid brow,
Always so sure
"That no things but the right things shall endure !"
Sombrely neat, so orderly and prim,
Always a little grim.
Austere but kind. . . .
Smooth-banded hair and smoothly-banded mind.
But let me whisper it to you today —
I know it now —
That deep in her there was a flame at play.
Beneath that brow
The blue-grey eyes sought beauty, found it too
Most often by the ocean's passionate blue.
Her sea-beach treasures — shells and coloured weed
Gathered and hoarded with glad human greed —
The Edge of the World
Once I stood at the edge o' the world —
Were you ever there?
The sky came down to an opal sea,
Out there in space hung a dream-made ship
And the earth was only a narrow strip
Of sea-shells, ground by the wheels of Time.
No living things but my Love and I,
And one white bird that was sailing by —
But ah how foolish ! Why do I try
To tell it now . . . like a stifled cry!
My edge o' the world !
Back to day in the valley !
Small, green world, so sheltered and warm,
Fruit trees white where the brown bees swarm,
Gay little crowded gardens blow,
Gay little feet run to and fro—
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