| My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see, If Immortality unveil A third event to me. So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. ------------------- Softened by Time�s consummate plush, How sleek the woe appears, That threatened childhood�s citadel, And undermined the years. Bisected now, by bleaker griefs, We envy the despair, That devastated childhood�s realm, So easy to repair. ------------------------- IN THE DESERT In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said: �Is it good, friend??� �It is bitter - bitter,� he answered; �But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.� ------------------ RELUCTANCE Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown higher and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question �Whither??� Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And blow and accept the end Of a love or a season?? ---------------------------- There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says the leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one is to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past, When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminishing thing?? ----------------------------- GOLD Nature�s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf�s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. --------------------- |
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