petals

Petals

Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.

Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Amy Lowell

Snow White to the Prince by Delia Sherman

I am beautiful you say, sublime,

Black and crystal as a winter's night,

With lips like rubies, cabochon,

My eyes deep blue as sapphires.

I cannot blame you for your praise:

You took me for my beauty, after all;

A jewel in a casket, still as death,

A lovely effigy, a prince's prize,

The fairest in the land.

But you woke me, or your horses did,

Stumbling as they bore me down the path,

Shaking the poisoned apple from my throat.

And now you say you love me, and would wed me

For my beauty's sake. My cursed beauty.

Will you hear now why I curse it?

It should have been my mother's — it had been,

Until I took it from her.

I was fourteen, a flower newly blown,

My mother's faithful shadow and her joy.

I remember combing her hair one day,

Playing for love her tire-woman's part,

Folding her thick hair strand over strand

Into an ebon braid, thick as my wrist,

And pinned it round and round her head

Into a living crown.

I looked up from my handiwork and saw

Our faces, hers and mine, caught in the mirror's eye.

Twin white ovals like repeated moons

Bright amid our midnight hair. Our eyes

Like heaven's bowl; our lips like autumn berries.

She frowned a little, lifted hand to throat.

urned her head this way and then the other.

Our eyes met in the glass.

I saw what she had seen: her hair white-threaded,

Her face and throat fine-lined, her eyes softened

Like a mirror that clouds and cracks with age;

While I was newly silvered, sharp and clear.

I hid my eyes, but could not hide my knowledge.

Forty may be fair; fourteen is fairer still.

She smiled at my reflection, cold as glass,

And then dismissed me thankless.

Not long after the huntsman came, bearing

A knife, a gun, a little box, to tell me

My mother no longer loved me. He spared me, though,

Unasked, because I was too beautiful to kill.

And the seven little men whose house

I kept that winter and the following year,

They loved me for my beauty's sake, my beauty

That cost me my mother's love.

Do you think I did not know her,

Ragged and gnarled and stooped like a wind-bent tree,

Her basket full of combs and pins and laces?

Of course I took her poisoned gifts. I wanted

To feel her hands combing out my hair,

To let her lace me up, to take an apple

From her hand, a smile from her lips,

As when I was a child.

Choice

Choice

I'd rather have the thought of you
To hold against my heart,
My spirit to be taught of you
With west winds blowing,
Than all the warm caresses
Of another love's bestowing,
Or all the glories of the world
In which you had no part.

I'd rather have the theme of you
To thread my nights and days,
I'd rather have the dream of you
With faint stars glowing,
I'd rather have the want of you,
The rich, elusive taunt of you
Forever and forever and forever unconfessed
Than claim the alien comfort
Of any other's breast.

O lover! O my lover,
That this should come to me!
I'd rather have the hope of you,
Ah, Love, I'd rather grope for you
Within the great abyss
Than claim another's kiss-
Alone I'd rather go my way
Throughout eternity.

Angela Morgan

Bond and Free by Robert Frost

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about—
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world’s embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Blue Umbrellas

Blue Umbrellas by D. J. Enright


'The thing that makes a blue umbrella with its tail -
how do you call it?' you ask. Poorly and pale
Comes my answer. For all I can call it is peacock.

Now that you go to school, you will learn how we call all sorts of things;
How we mar great works by our mean recital.
You will learn, for instance, that Head Monster is not the gentleman's accepted title;
The blue-tailed eccentrics will be merely peacocks; the dead bird will no longer doze
Off till tomorrow's lark, for the latter has killed him.
The dictionary is opening, the gay umbrellas close.

Oh our mistaken teachers! -
It was not a proper respect for words that we need,
But a decent regard for things, those older creatures and more real.
Later you may even resort to writing verse
To prove the dishonesty of names and their black greed -
To confess your ignorance, to exiate your crime, seeking one spell to
life another curse.
Or you may, more commodiously, spy on your children, busy discoverers,
Without the dubious benefit of rhyme.

A WOMAN'S QUESTION

A WOMAN'S QUESTION

Do you know you have asked for the costliest thing
Ever made by the hand above?
A woman's heart, and a woman's life--
And a woman's wonderful love.

Do you know you have asked for this priceless thing
As a child might ask for a toy?
Demanding what others have died to win
With the reckless dash of a boy.

You have written my lesson of duty out,
Manlike, you have questioned me.
Now stand at the bars of my woman's soul
Until I shall question thee.

You require your mutton shall always be hot,
Your socks and your shirt be whole;
I require your heart be as true as God's stars
And as pure as His heaven your soul.

You require a cook for your mutton and beef,
I require a far greater thing;
A seamstress you're wanting for socks and shirts---
I look for a man and a king.

A king for the beautiful realm called Home,
And a man that his Maker, God,
Shall look upon as he did on the first
And say: "It is very good."

I am fair and young, but the rose may fade
From this soft young cheeck one day;
Will you love me then, 'mid the falling leaves
As you did 'mong the blossoms of May?

Is your heart an ocean so strong and true,
I may launch my all on its tide?
A loving woman finds heaven or hell
On the day she is made a bride.

I require all things that are grand and true,
All things that a man should be;
If you give this all, I would stake my life
To be all you demand of me.

If you cannot be this, a laundress and cook
You can hire and little to pay;
But a woman's heart and a woman's life
Are not to be won that way.

Sara Teasdale's I shall not care

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you shall lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.