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A Tale
THERE once the walls
Of the ruined cottage stood.
The periwinkle crawls
With flowers in its hair into the wood.
In flowerless hours
Never will the bank fail,
With everlasting flowers
On fragments of blue plates, to tell the tale.
Poems on the topic: ruin
Poems on the topic “ruin” on Poets.by.
The House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
Gone, Gone Again
GONE, gone again,
May, June, July,
And August gone,
Again gone by,
Not memorable
Save that I saw them go,
As past the empty quays
The rivers flow.
And now again,
In the harvest rain,
The Blenheim oranges
Fall grubby from the trees,
As when I was young--
And when the lost one was here--
And when the war began
To turn young men to dung.
Reality show
entertaining to see how age
and ruin change us
a hard rain
meeting with our selves
a sort of tar
Decline and fall
I wonder at the whole
design of ruin
evening is the same
but more portable
like a quiet pleasure
enlightening the body
Proverbial (14)
A heart put in a closet
is a loss of great concern,
but a heart in the prison of sex
will find too little to grieve for.
Ruin is our ointment.
The other is a match to any pain.
Psychogeology
the stone is no home
for solemnity
the stone must be open
to time and ruin
approaching the ground
with no earhole
green and slow
like a ship of fools
New Hampshire
The bear sleeps in the cellar hole, where pine needles
heap over the granite doorstep. And the well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of the oak tree
which has grown where the anvil rusted in the forge.
When my eyes close, I can see another summer:
a bark of rust grows on the trees of the gas pumps,
and the EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners, and a wildcat waits for deer
on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.
Homeless
I ASKED for sunlight and a long, long day
To build my little home.
Setting an altar where my heart might lay
Fire ere the god should come.
I built my walls with patient carefulness,
Secure and small, nor knew
A wild wind straying from the wilderness
Had sought their shelter too.
My heart woke up in storms, my shelter sweet
In ruins fell apart.
Once more I go by cruel ways to meet
The ordeal of the heart.
Ruins of Paestum
On lowlands where the temples lie
The marsh-grass mingles with the flowers,
Only the little songs of birds
Link the unbroken hours.
So in the end, above my heart
Once like the city wild and gay,
The slow white stars will pass by night,
The swift brown birds by day.
Debris
I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls--
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodged an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house.
Beyond the Barn
I rose up with the sun
And climbed the hill.
I saw the white mists run
And shadows run
Down into hollow woods.
I went with the white clouds
That swept the hill.
A wind struck the low hedge trees
And clustering trees,
And rocked in each tall elm.
The long afternoon was calm
When down the hill
I came, and felt the air cool,
The shadows cool;
And I walked on footsore,
Saying, "But two hours more,
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