Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

O the old wall here! How I could pass
Life in a long midsummer day,
My feet confined to a plot of grass,
My eyes from a wall not once away!

And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe
Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green:
Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath,
In lappets of tangle they laugh between.

Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe?
Why tremble the sprays? What life o'erbrims
The body,--the house no eye can probe,--
Divined, as beneath a robe, the limbs?

And there again! But my heart may guess
Who tripped behind; and she sang, perhaps:
So the old wall throbbed, and its life's excess
Died out and away in the leafy wraps.

Wall upon wall are between us: life
And song should away from heart to heart!
I--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife
At breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start--

Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing
That's spirit: tho' cloistered fast, soar free;
Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring
Of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!
...

BURYING friends is not a pomp,
Not, indeed, Roman:
Lacking the monument,
Heroic stone;
Nor is it an obscuring parasol,
The pad of customary gloves and cries
And a black leather mourning-carriage
Hung between death and the beholder's eyes.
This little bin of cancelled flesh
Strode the earth once,

...

I may not be sure,
If you love me or not.
I can't speak that through words.
I tried to find the words within,
Do I really matter to them-
Or you're too scared to speak that through!

I heard the whispers of calling upon my
name in your heart,
Should I call this a deja vu?

...

Waking in the night;
the lamp is low,
the oil freezing.



It has rained enough
to turn the stubble on the field
black.




Winter rain
falls on the cow-shed;
a cock crows.




The leeks
newly washed white,-
how cold it is!




The sea darkens;
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white.

...

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.

...

The trees have secrets
They cover it with leaves
They're spies and undercover thieves
But every year they lose their cover
Their shields fall to the floor
Their defences cracking, one after the other
Shedding their old skin, ready for more
The broken orange promises cry softly as they fall
Covering the floor in a temporary blanket
A break from the cold, a comforting shawl

...

C.
Damon come drive thy flocks this way.

D.
No : 'tis too late they went astray.

C.
I have a grassy Scutcheon spy'd,
Where Flora blazons all her pride.
The grass I aim to feast thy Sheep :
The Flow'rs I for thy Temples keep.

D.
Grass withers; and the Flow'rs too fade.

C.
Seize the short Joyes then, ere they vade.
Seest thou that unfrequented Cave ?

D.
That den?

C.
Loves Shrine.

D.
But Virtue's Grave.

C.
In whose cool bosome we may lye

...

I'll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that's just the beginning.
Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born,
new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,
trying to decide about this new life.

Then they're in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They're frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean

...

Love

You are the light inside my heart,
You guide me when the days feel dark,
You stay with me and never part,
My world begins where you embark.
...