After Death
Now while my lips are living
Their words must stay unsaid,
And will my soul remember
To speak when I am dead?
Yet if my soul remembered
You would not heed it, dear,
For now you must not listen,
And then you could not hear.
Poems on the topic: silence
Poems on the topic “silence” on Poets.by.
Swans
Night is over the park, and a few brave stars
Look on the lights that link it with chains of gold,
The lake bears up their reflection in broken bars
That seem too heavy for tremulous water to hold.
We watch the swans that sleep in a shadowy place,
And now and again one wakes and uplifts its head;
How still you are--your gaze is on my face--
We watch the swans and never a word is said.
February
They spoke of him I love
With cruel words and gay;
My lips kept silent guard
On all I could not say.
I heard, and down the street
The lonely trees in the square
Stood in the winter wind
Patient and bare.
I heard . . . oh voiceless trees
Under the wind, I knew
The eager terrible spring
Hidden in you.
"It Is Not a Word"
It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,
But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.
Those Who Love
Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love,
Francesca, Guinevere,
Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak if at all
Of fragile, inconsequent things.
And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride,
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.
Interlude, for a Solitary Flute VI
In the fine land of Nowhere,
On the far side of There,
We shall be very happy,
We shall have no care ;
You will be the blossom;
I shall be the bough;
In the great time coming
After Now.
While you are crying.
Listen to my song;
My own heart is breaking.
But I shall be strong:
I shall be strong for thinking
Of the fine days and fair,
When we are done with being
Anywhere.
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.
Interlude
Sun-light recedes on the mountains, in long gold shafts,
Like the falling pillars of a temple.
Then singing silence almost too nimble for ears:
The mountain-tenors fling their broad voices
Into the blue hall of the sky,
And through a rigid column of these voices
Night dumbly walks.
Night, crushing sound between his fingers
Until it forms a lightly frozen couch
On which he dreams.
Intrusion
The lilies sag with rain-drops:
Their petals hold fire that does not break out.
(As though it slept between vapor-silk
It could not burn).
And a young breeze stumbles upon the lilies
And strokes them with his spinning hands....
The lilies and the young breeze are not unlike
Your silence and the rush of soft words breaking it.
Minna IV
Moonlight bends over black silence,
Making it bloom to wild-flowers of sound
That only green things can hear.
A wind sprawls over an orchard,
Frightening its silent litany to sound.
A thread of star-light has fallen to this tree
And curls among its leaves, tangling them to silence....
Standing amidst these things, Beloved,
We feel the words our hearts cannot form.
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.
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