You crash over the trees,
you crack the live branch--
the branch is white,
the green crushed,
each leaf is rent like split wood.
You burden the trees
with black drops,
you swirl and crash--
you have broken off a weighted leaf
in the wind,
it is hurled out,
whirls up and sinks,
a green stone.
The woes of flesh are naught
To one who knows
The agony of soul!
'Twere but the thud of wind and rain
Upon the roof.
The woes of flesh are naught
To one who knows!
It lies alone upon a tide-swept shore,
Above a crescent beach of silver sand,
Flung high upon the rocks by some great hand
Stretched from the dark, whose fingers clutched and tore
The main-mast from the ship. Above it soar
White gulls, and near in wild-rose tangle stand
Old twisted pines, where song-birds of the land
Mingle soft singing with the ocean's roar.
And through long summer days it dreams old dreams
Of far-off southern forests, and the sighing
Of wind-blown boughs above bird-haunted streams;
But when the storm sets the white spindrift flying
It thrills and trembles with the old unrest,
And shakes the wild-rose petals from its breast.
The well-made sonnet takes the azure sea
Proud in her beauty as a halcyon,
Her timbers chosen words, and melody
Filling her sails of rhyme. She passes on
In majesty and calm, but these my lines
Are like a crazy and a leaky boat,
Clumsily made of warped and twisted pines
That hardly on the troubled waters float.
Now comes an arrogant great wave ahead
That swamps the blunted bow and spumes along ;
Into the storm I drift in doubt and dread,
Patient, not brave, enduring but not strong.
I know not on this huge and angry sea
How far my wretched ship can carry me.
The cloud-cymbals make the music of the thunder;
The lightning-maid dances to its measure;
While the breeze-devotees sing their prayer.
A worship of lunatics, this;
God-mad souls seeking peace;
Dervishes, whose agony knows no surcease.
No many-color-robed priest is here;
No conch-shell's flourish and blare;
No frankincense, myrrh, or perfume rare.
A worship of passion and powers;
A benediction of liquid flowers
Poured through a million silver showers.
The sun glints the waves with silver;
The gull, a white butterfly of desire;
The barque, a fancy of some intoxicated singer.
The brown islets, lost souls from the world of song;
The wind, an ever-sounding, unseen gong,
Telling of the worship of the sun, the sea and the storm.
Blue, brown, silver, song, sound and storm;
Dreams of a dying hour, shadow of a morn
That we have seen mirrored in the heart of song.
Fasten black eyes on me.
I ask nothing of you under the peach trees,
Fasten your black eyes in my gray with the spear of a storm.
The air under the peach blossoms is a haze of pink.
Storms have beaten on this point of land
And ships gone to wreck here
and the passers-by remember it
with talk on the deck at night
as they near it.
Fists have beaten on the face of this old prize-fighter
And his battles have held the sporting pages
and on the street they indicate him with their
right fore-finger as one who once wore
a championship belt.
A hundred stories have been published and a thousand
rumored
About why this tall dark man has divorced two beautiful
young women
And married a third who resembles the first two
and they shake their heads and say, " There he
A LONE gray bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.
Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers.
Out into the gloom it swings and batters.
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown.
Love of mist and rapture of flight.
Glories of chance and hazards of death
On its eager and palpitant wings.
Out into the deep of the great dark world.
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
When you are tired of the long road and the open sky,
I wish it may be my door that you're passing by :
I wish it may be my hearth where you will sit down
And tell your tales of the land and sea and the strange far town.
Oh, come you in from eastward or come you from the west,
Here's good cheer to greet you and welcome of the best:
Oh come you with your pockets full or come you home poor.
Here's a place by the fireside and an open door.
You'll tell me where you were since, and the things you've seen
Up and down the wide world where so long you've been, —
All the time that I've been here and you far away, —
And then awhile be silent, as good friends may.
And then awhile listen to the wind and rain,
Fools drove him with goads and whips
Down to the sea where there were ships.
And he was forced at the risk of his neck
To find a refuge on a stranger's deck.
Then that ship sailed away
Far from the land that day,
He watched the sky, and mourned to be
In such a dread captivity.
But from a rift of flying cloud
Burst a tempest quick and loud;
A burning bolt struck the strange deck
Bringing the ship to sudden wreck.
So the poor slave swam free
Over a quick calmed sea:
On a new coast-line he was thrown,
And claimed a virgin island for his own.
If I live all my days by routine,
Keeping days ordered and ways clean,
Will there be room for Love in my life?
Love who is born in storm, and lives in strife.