Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
     Where knowledge is free;
     Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
     Where words come out from the depth of truth;
     Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
     Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
     Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— 
     Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Long vast shapes... cooled and flushed through with darkness...
Lidless windows
Glazed with a flashy luster
From some little pert café chirping up like a sparrow.
And down among iron guts
Piled silver
Throwing gray spatter of light... pale without heat...
Like the pallor of dead bodies.

            —Bjöm Håkansson

The cry I bring down from the hills

belongs to a girl still burning

inside my head. At daybreak

      she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire

in a thigh-shaped valley.

A skirt of flames

dances around her

at dusk.

          We stand with our hands

hanging at our sides,

while she burns

          like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.

She burns like a cattail torch

dipped in gasoline.

She glows like the fat tip

of a banker’s cigar,

      silent as quicksilver.

A tiger under a rainbow

   at nightfall.

She burns like a shot glass of vodka.

She burns like a field of poppies

at the edge of a rain forest.

She rises like dragonsmoke

    to my nostrils.

She burns like a burning bush

driven by a godawful wind.

You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?   
  White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge?   
  Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge   
Of our early love that hardly has opened yet.   
   
Here there’s an almond tree—you have never seen         
  Such a one in the north—it flowers on the street, and I stand   
  Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers that expand   
At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.   
   
Under the almond tree, the happy lands   
  Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,   
  And passing feet are chatter and clapping of those   
Who play around us, country girls clapping their hands.   
   
You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown,   
  All your unbearable tenderness, you with the laughter   
  Startled upon your eyes now so wide with hereafter,    
You with loose hands of abandonment hanging down.

O day—if I could cup my hands and drink of you,

And make this shining wonder be

A part of me!

O day! O day!

You lift and sway your colors on the sky

Till I am crushed with beauty. Why is there

More of reeling sunlit air

Than I can breathe? Why is there sound

In silence? Why is a singing wound

About each hour?

And perfume when there is no flower?

O day! O Day! How may I press

Nearer to loveliness?