The rose lay dying in the summer heat
And longed to save her life so fair and brief.
A dryad, bathing in the noonday sun,
Spied her and dropped a tear to show her grief.
The panting bloom drank deep the sweetening drop-
And lived an hour to deck a singer's wreath.
Long after we have ceased to be
The sun will light in bush and tree
And shine unchanged ; the high turf hill
Shall stand up in beauty still ;
And all the valleys that we knew
Put on again the summer's hue,
When we are gone, when we are gone,
And are what green things feed upon.
The fields are full of summer still
And breathe again upon the air
From brown dry side of hedge and hill
More sweetness than the sense can bear.
So some old couple, who in youth
With love were filled and over-full,
And loved with strength and loved with truth,
In heavy age are beautiful.
The wind has blown my heart away
All on a summer holiday.
If you can find it, pray you tell,
For this is how the loss befell :
If you will now my tale believe,
I wore my heart upon my sleeve,
So came it that, alack the day !
The wind did blow my heart away.
A summer song it was,
Counting of many unseen stars
In an intangible sky
Making new milky ways--
Silver-shadow-paths that lead
From sapphire abysses
Into deeper abysses still.
The deeps of our souls
Lit by passion's burning flowers
Tremulous, timorous flames of silver,
That with thousand hands
Our hearts sought to pluck and scatter,
Or make barbed garlands
For love's nuptial hour.
Nuptial hour, briefer than a moment,
Longer than Heaven's Eternal summer,
Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
So near you are, summer stars,
So near, strumming, strumming,
So lazy and hum-strumming.
Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer
misses one of us the two of us miss summer —
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long
breath for the change to low contralto singing
mornings when the green corn leaves first break
through the black loam —
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody
of the moon songs in the light nights when the
earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains
lighter than a goose down —
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the
laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind
motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations
of slow sea water on the shingle silver
in the wind —
The knees
of this proud woman
are bone.
The elbows
of this proud woman
are bone.
The summer-white stars
and the winter-white stars
never stop circling
around this proud woman.
The bones
of this proud woman
answer the vibrations
of the stars.
In summer
the stars speak deep thoughts
There was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkley's
timber.
Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on
the walnuts and the hazel.
There was a wild pigeon.
There was a summer came year by year to Hinkley's
timber.
Rainy months and sunny and pigeons calling and one
pigeon best of all who came.
There was a summer.
It is so long ago I saw this wild pigeon and listened.
It is so long ago I heard the summer song of the
pigeon who told me why night comes, why death
and stars come, why the whippoorwill remembers
three notes only and always.
It is so long ago; it is like now and today; the gray
Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's hair,
And fluff of white from a cottonwood.
Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
Is this the day she comes?
O wild-flower face of Morning,
Must you never wake?
Silvery, silvery sea-line,
Does she come to-day?
O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
Beneath your whispering shadow
She will surely pass;
And thrush beneath the black-thorn
And white-throat in the pine-top,
Sing as you have never sung,
For she will surely come!
The lone green of the lawn-slope,
The grey light on the sky-line,
The mournful stir of birch-leaves,
In summer when my life was cold,
Frozen too weary for desire,
I warmed my heart at your marigold,
As at a fire.
It was the first flower from your new ground,
The first gold largess from the care
And loving, you had planted there,
And in the walks around.
I stole your garden's coin to buy content,
A vision of black earth dug deep for flowers.
Through sunny self-forgetful hours.
With joys, God meant.
In summer when my life was cold,
Frozen too weary for desire,
I warmed my heart at your marigold.
As at a fire.