Hokku 57
I row across the expanse of sea,
And the far-away sky, —
I row across the white billows of pain.
Poems on the topic: pain
Poems on the topic “pain” on Poets.by.
While I May
Wind and hail and veering rain,
Driven mist that veils the day,
Soul's distress and body's pain,
I would bear you while I may.
I would love you if I might,
For so soon my life will be
Buried in a lasting night,
Even pain denied to me.
Doctors
Every night I lie awake
And every day I lie abed
And hear the doctors, Pain and Death,
Conferring at my head.
They speak in scientific tones,
Professional and low--
One argues for a speedy cure,
The other, sure and slow.
To one so humble as myself
It should be matter for some pride
To have such noted fellows here,
Conferring at my side.
Pain
Waves are the sea's white daughters,
And raindrops the children of rain,
But why for my shimmering body
Have I a mother like Pain?
Night is the mother of stars,
And wind the mother of foam--
The world is brimming with beauty,
But I must stay at home.
Open Windows
Out of the window a sea of green trees
Lift their soft boughs like the arms of a dancer,
They beckon and call me, "Come out in the sun!"
But I cannot answer.
I am alone with Weakness and Pain,
Sick abed and June is going,
I cannot keep her, she hurries by
With the silver-green of her garments blowing.
Men and women pass in the street
Glad of the shining sapphire weather,
But we know more of it than they,
Pain and I together.
They are the runners in the sun,
Breathless and blinded by the race,
But we are watchers in the shade
Who speak with Wonder face to face.
Words for an Old Air
Your heart is bound tightly, let
Beauty beware,
It is not hers to set
Free from the snare.
Tell her a bleeding hand
Bound it and tied it,
Tell her the knot will stand
Though she deride it;
One who withheld so long
All that you yearned to take,
Has made a snare too strong
For Beauty’s self to break.
When I Was One and Twenty
When I was one and twenty.
My ills were in their prime.
With aches and pains aplenty.
And gout before my time;
I had the pyorrhea,
And fever turned me blue—
They said that I would be a
Dead man at twenty-two.
Now I am two and twenty.
The aches and pains I thought
Were miseries aplenty,
Compared to these, are naught;
And even these are bubbles,
That scarce can worry me,
When I regard the troubles
I'll have at twenty-three.
Minna VIII
You draw my heart about you, as a cloak,
And your words steal over it like a reluctant color:
A color of pain that fears to die.
My heart ripples with your slight turning
But sometimes moves when you are still,
Beckoning to longings that have not reached your mouth.
Minna V
Pain is a country cousin of yours.
He flings buds of awakening desires
Upon the stately weddings in your heart,
And laughs.
You must teach him better manners;
Bind his mouth with pale sleep;
Caress him with trailing hands
That loosen the buds he has stolen, into flowers.
Minna XXV
Upon an arched sarcophagus of pain
Are figures painted in arrested embraces
With outlines so light that we must bend close to see:
Old loves almost merging to one tone
Of pale regret that holds
An inner glow of dead weeping.
Our lips cling and our breath winds to a hand
With touch like summer rain
Blending the arrested figures upon the arched sarcophagus of pain.
Minna XXIV
We blew a luminous confusion of thoughts
Upon the silence of our souls,
Staining it to little, weeping tints.
Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each other
And stroked it away to twilights of relief.
Our lips shook before the tread of coming words,
But closed again, finding no need for them.
Memory
Through tortured weeks of hospital surgery
The old fruit garden of my childhood days
Grew close about me. Through black storms of pain
Swayed joyous boughs of rosy apple-bloom;
White blossomed branches of an old plum-tree;
Old grape-vines clinging to a sunny wall;
Great bushes of red currants and raspberries.
Through hours of torturing thirst I found again
That old fruit garden--as if body and soul
Clutched at cool juicy fruits--remembering--
Devouring them through a parched mouth of the brain.
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