somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1940, 1951, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976, 1978, 1979 by George James Firmage.
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf
The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –
Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
Old Ones crack –
I could not die – with You –
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down –
You – could not –
And I – could I stand by
And see You – freeze –
Without my Right of Frost –
Death's privilege?
Nor could I rise – with You –
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ –
That New Grace
Glow plain – and foreign
On my homesick Eye –
Except that You than He
Shone closer by –
They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –
Because You saturated Sight –
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise
And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –
And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
translated from the Spanish by Muna Lee
The dungeon crushes me—over my restless spirit
Pass dark thoughts unspoken.
My poet’s wings, even in unfolding,
Against four walls are broken.
Entombed and alive! The nights are eternal,
And eternal are the days.
Sorrows companion me, spies are about me,
The fetter upon me weighs.
But on closing my eyes—(light, sky, and meadow!)—
Broken I see my chain.
With my love on my arm I breathe deep in the garden
Of magnolia and vervain.
I delight in the air, in the running water,
Fresh as my belovèd one.
There is still something good despots cannot imprison,
Nor heap chains upon!
From Poetry, Vol. XXVI (June 1925). This poem is in the public domain.
Plant, above my lifeless heart
Crimson roses, red as blood.
As if the love, pent there so long
Were pouring forth its flood.
Then, through them, my heart may tell,
Its Past of Love and Grief,
And I shall feel them grow from it,
And know a vague relief.
Through rotting shroud shall feel their roots,
And unto them myself shall grow,
And when I blossom at her feet,
She, on that day, shall know!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Come and lie with me and love me,
Bitterness.
Touch me with your hands a little,
Kiss me, as you lean above me,
With your cold sadistic kisses;
Wind your hair close, close around me,
Pain might dissipate this blankness.
Hurt me even, even wound me,
I have need of love that stings.
Come and lie with me and love me,
Bitterness.
So that I may laugh at things.
From On a Grey Thread (Will Ransom, 1923) by Elsa Gidlow. This poem is in the public domain.
Now you are gone I kiss your dented pillow
And wonder if it hungers like my breast
For the dear head we both have held in rest.
I said once: Love alone cannot assuage
My thirst, my hunger, love has no reply
For that wild questioning, for this fierce cry.
I said: there is no kiss can feed me now.
Perhaps love is life’s flower: I seek the root.
Yea, I have loved and love is dead sea fruit.
Yet, I lie here and kiss your dented pillow,
A trembling girl who loves you overmuch––
A harp in anguish for the player’s touch.
From On a Grey Thread (Will Ransom, 1923) by Elsa Gidlow. This poem is in the public domain.
Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.
If it had been a rose
I might have smiled and pinned it to my dress:
We should have said Good Night indifferently
And never met again.
But the white iris!
It looked so infinitely pure
In the thin green moonlight.
A thousand little purple things
That had trembled about me through
the young years
Floated into a shape I seem always to have known
That I suddenly called Love!
The faint touch of your long fingers on mine
wakened me.
I saw that your tumbled hair was bright
with flame,
That your eyes were sapphire souls with
hungry stars in them,
And your lips were too near not to be kissed.
Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.
From On a Grey Thread (Will Ransom, 1923) by Elsa Gidlow. This poem is in the public domain.
I
The colors of the rainbow are fading in the silent
and distant West, and the heartache of
twilight trembles within my aching breast.
For the light of my love has faded like sunbeams
in the West, and the color of twilight will
tremble forever in my breast.
II
I think of thy kindness often, when lonesome I feel
and cold, I have not forgotten our childhood,
nor your loving words of old.
And still my sweetest songs of life are floating
in dreams to thee, like whisperings at eventide,
across a clouded sea.
III
We two are sitting in the bark, and listen to the
wavelets’ play, the shore is melting in the
dark, day’s echoes silently decay.
Oh life, with all thy hopes so fair, wilt thou
too float away, like visions rising in the
air that greet the parting day!
IV
She stands amidst the roses, and tears dart from her
eyes that like the fragrant roses her soul
must fade and die.
He stares at the twilight ocean on the shore of a
foreign land, a faded rose is trembling
within his soft white hand.
V
The rushes whisper softly, the sounds of silence wake,
large flowers like sad remembrance float
on the dark green lake.
Were life but like the waters, so bright and calm
and deep, and love like floating flowers
that on the surface meet.
VI
The naked trees of autumn grope shivering through
twilight’s gloom, athwart the whispering branches
its dying embers loom.
I dream of life’s defoliation, as I watch with
silent dread, leaf after leaf departing, like
hopes long withered and dead.
VII
In haunting hours of twilight dreams restless the
turbulent sea, and heaves her white wanton
bosom in endless mystery.
Dream on, dream on, titanic queen, beloved sea, at
thy wanton breast, I would find rest
in endless mystery.
From Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904) by Sadakichi Hartmann. This poem is in the public domain.
My love has hair
Like midnight,
But midnight fades to dawn.
My love has eyes
Like starlight,
But starlight fades in morn.
My love has a voice
Like dew-fall,
But dew-fall dies at a breath.
My love has love
Like life’s all,
But life’s all fades in death.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 18, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
I Know my love is true,
And oh the day is fair.
The sky is dear and blue,
The flowers are rich of hue,
The air I breathe is rare,
I have no grief or care;
For my own love is true,
And oh the day is fair.
My love is false I find,
And oh the day is dark.
Blows sadly down the wind,
While sorrow holds my mind;
I do not hear the lark,
For quenched is life's dear spark,—
My love is false I find,
And oh the day is dark!
For love doth make the day
Or dark or doubly bright;
Her beams along the way
Dispel the gloom and gray.
She lives and all is bright,
She dies and life is night.
For love doth make the day,
Or dark or doubly bright.
This poem is in the public domain.
A blue-bell springs upon the ledge,
A lark sits singing in the hedge;
Sweet perfumes scent the balmy air,
And life is brimming everywhere.
What lark and breeze and bluebird sing,
Is Spring, Spring, Spring!
No more the air is sharp and cold;
The planter wends across the wold,
And, glad, beneath the shining sky
We wander forth, my love and I.
And ever in our hearts doth ring
This song of Spring, Spring!
For life is life and love is love,
'Twixt maid and man or dove and dove.
Life may be short, life may be long,
But love will come, and to its song
Shall this refrain for ever cling
Of Spring, Spring, Spring!
This poem is in the public domain.