Les plus lus ▸
Winifred Welles
There is a great, sweet golden bell in me —
It has a chime of flame, a flame so bright
I seem to walk forever in its light,
As gods do in their immortality.
Such a tremendous joy would come to be.
That chains would turn to wreaths of blowing white,
And crutches drop for wings to flare in flight,
If I could ring the bell that is in me.
Oh if I could ! The stars would shake — and suns
And moons collapse, and the hollow ways of death
Fill with enough of echo to revive
Such restlessness among the saintly ones,
That the oldest of them all would catch his breath
Remembering what it was to be alive!
As I wandered over the city through the night,
I saw many strange things:
But I have forgotten all
Except one painted face.
Gaudy, shameless night-orchid,
Heavy, flushed, sticky with narcotic perfume,
There was something in you which made me prefer you
Above all the feeble forget-me-nots of the world.
You were neither burnt out nor pallid,
There was plain, coarse, vulgar meaning in every line of you
And no make-believe:
You were at least alive,
When all the rest were but puppets of the night.
Legs hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.
And you left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
Grasshoppers go in many a thumming spring
And now to stalks of tasseled sow-grass cling,
That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;
While arching oxeye doubles with his weight.
Next on the cat-tail-grass with farther bound
He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.
A Death blow is a Life blow to Some
Who till they died, did not alive become --
Who had they lived, had died but when
They died, Vitality begun.