XX [A white curtain turning in an open window]
A white curtain turning in an open window.
A swan, dipping a white neck in the trees’ shadow,
Hardly beating the water with golden feet.
Sorrow before her
Was gone like noise from a street,
Snow falling.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“XX” [A white curtain turning in an open window] was published in Five Groups of Verse (Charles Reznikoff, 1927). About Reznikoff’s poetic style, scholar David L. Gunton wrote in his essay “Objectivism (Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Oppen),” found in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, “While Reznikoff employed several poetic styles throughout his career, all of his work exhibits a marked concentration on images and facts with a bare minimum of editorializing or melodrama—an undeniably ‘objectivist’ aesthetic. The poems that populate his early self-published collections typically consist of a few untitled lines that seek to capture a particular image.”
Charles Reznikoff
Born in 1894, in Brooklyn, New York, Charles Reznikoff was the author of several poetry collections and was a principal proponent of Objectivism.