Young Poet Poem by Maxwell Bodenheim

The grinning clamour on your face
Dies abruptly, for moments:
Boldness and timidity
Are swept, transfigured, against each other.
But the glistening turmoil
Once more spurns itself with jests
That light its troubled hands.

When too much pain has lowered
The eyelids of your mood,
A peaceful humour wraps your face.
You are like an old man
Watching children fly from his fingertips.
In your kirtle of borrowed skies
You find a sorrow luring your horizons
Into hesitating brightness. . . .
When night remembers, you have straightened
Into stealthy, angry calmness
Fingering it first, unsent arrow.