What you do with time is what a grandmother clock does with it: strike twelve and take its time doing it. You’re the clock: time passes, you remain. And wait. Waiting is what happens to a snow-covered garden, a trunk under moss, hope for better times in the nineteenth century, or words in a poem. For poetry is about letting things grow moldy together, like grapes turning into wine, reality into preserves, and hoarding words in the cellar of yourself.
From The Plural of Happiness: Selected Poems of Herman de Coninck, translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown, Oberlin College Press, © 2006. Reprinted with permission of Oberlin College Press.
Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity, And she my loadstar while I go and come. And so because you love me, and because I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name: In you not fourscore years can dim the flame Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws Of time and change and mortal life and death.
This poem is in the public domain.
You are as gold as the half-ripe grain that merges to gold again, as white as the white rain that beats through the half-opened flowers of the great flower tufts thick on the black limbs of an Illyrian apple bough. Can honey distill such fragrance As your bright hair— For your face is as fair as rain, yet as rain that lies clear on white honey-comb, lends radiance to the white wax, so your hair on your brow casts light for a shadow.
From Hymen, 1921. From The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature: An Anthology of the Finest Imagist Poems, edited by William Pratt and published by Story Line Press. © 2001 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Posted with permission of Story Line Press. All rights reserved.