I AM WITH YOU

PRETEND THIS POEM IS ME,

AND I AM WITH YOU

Pretend this poem is me, and I am with you;

I hold you in the circle of my fire.

Come into me, and time and space will vanish,

You and I alone, joined at the root.

There is a special room where I am with you;

I close the door and you are in my arms.

You become my skin, my self, my world,

Till I go back to sleep in lonely darkness.

So we defeat the miles and months between us;

We make love in our hearts if not in touch.

You are more to me in hope and passion

Than any man who brushes by my day

Fade far away

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-ey'd despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Ere I was old

Ere I was old.

Ere I was old? Ah woful Ere,

Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!

O Youth! for years so many and sweet

'Tis known, that Thou and I were one,

I'll think it but a fond conceit--

It cannot be, that Thou art gone!

Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd:--

And thou wert aye a masker bold!

What strange disguise hast now put on,

To make believe, that Thou art gone?

I see these locks in silvery slips,

This drooping gait, this altered size:

But springtide blossoms on thy lips,

And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!

Life is but thought: so think I will

That Youth and I are house-mates still.

Dew-drops are the gems of morning,

But the tears of mournful eve!

Where no hope is, life's a warning

That only serves to make us grieve,

When we are old:

That only serves to make us grieve

With oft and tedious taking-leave,

Like some poor nigh-related guest,

That may not rudely be dismist.

Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while,

And tells the jest without the smile.

Deep in my soul

Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,

Lonely and lost to light for evermore,

Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,

Then trembles into silence as before.

There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp

Burns the slow flame, eternal--but unseen;

Which not the darkness of Despair can damp,

Though vain its ray as it had never been.

 Remember me--Oh! pass not thou my grave

Without one thought whose relics there recline:

The only pang my bosom dare not brave

Must be to find forgetfulness in thine.

My fondest--faintest--latest accents hear--

Grief for the dead not Virtue can reprove;

Then give me all I ever asked--a tear,

The first--last--sole reward of so much love!

DO NOT LOVE ME YET

Do not love me yet, for I

Am still a slender moon,

A scimitar about the heart

Too sharp to touch too soon.

Before I’m touched I need to grow

More full in golden light;

I need to smile upon my earth

And rule some patch of night.

I need to know what roads and fields

Lie in my domain

And dull my brand new ecstasies

With sophomoric pain.

I need the love of some blank boy

As cold and dark as me,

That we might grope in ignorance

And fear of what might be.

And then, when I’m a silver bowl

And know what I can hold,

Then, then, perhaps, we could try love

If you are not too old

America the Beautiful Revisited

America the Beautiful Revisited

America, while breathing gaseous skies,

Converts her amber waves of grain to gold.

She logs her mountains’ purple majesty

And risks her fruited plains in futures sold.

How could the selfless pilgrims have foreseen

The fiscal dust their sturdy feet would raise?

When did their quest for freedom of belief

Become obsessed with how much interest pays?

The early heroes’ hearts were filled with fire,

Replaced of late by nuclear doomsday fear.

When greed fails in these days to get its way,

Then hired generals flatten all that’s dear.

Those patriot dreamers failed to forecast years

Of lotteries and bets on football games,

Nor could they know what poverty and fears

Would lurk in cities bearing brave men’s names.

America! My poor America!

Thy crown of brotherhood is hard to see.

Thy god is Gold; thy goodness yields to law,

And lawyers fight from fee to shining fee.

NIGHT COMES TO ME

NIGHT COMES TO ME

THROUGHOUT THE DAY

Night comes to me throughout the day

And closes my external door.

I know that I am in for more

Unhappiness, and yet I stay.

The pain of missing you is less

Than that of missing thoughts of you.

And so I’d rather suffer through

This torture than face emptiness.

I want you with me, even though

You’re not with me. You are the light

That gets me through this awful night

Yet brings the darkness where I go.

Children dear, was it yesterday

Children dear, was it yesterday

(Call yet once) that she went away?

Once she sate with you and me,

On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,

And the youngest sate on her knee.

She comb'd its bright hair, and she tended it well,

When down swung the sound of the far-off bell.

She sigh'd, she look'd up through the clear green sea.

She said; "I must go, for my kinsfolk pray

In the little grey church on the shore to-day.

'Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me!

And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee."

I said; "Go up, dear heart, through the waves.

Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves."

She smil'd, she went up through the surf in the bay.

Children dear, was it yesterday?

Darkling i listen

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.

But when the meloncholy fit shall fall

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Come away.......

Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.
Now my brothers call from the bay;
Now the great winds shore wards blow;
Now the salt tides seawards flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way.
Call her once before you go.
Call once yet.
In a voice that she will know:
"Margaret! Margaret!"
Children's voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother's ear:
Children's voices, wild with pain.
Surely she will come again.
Call her once and come away.
This way, this way.
"Mother dear, we cannot stay."
The wild white horses foam and fret.
Margaret! Margaret!
Come, dear children, come away down.
Call no more.
One last look at the white-walled town,
And the little grey church on the windy shore.
Then come down.
She will not come though you call all day.
Come away, come away.

Our Love

OUR LOVE’S A PLACE

WHERE I NO LONGER LIVE

Our love’s a place where I no longer live;

That was a home, and now is just a house.

I went back in my heart the other day,

But nothing in there struck me as my own.

Strange how life moves on, and what we cherish

Turns to something alien in our hands.

And later, when we try to comprehend it,

It fades into the twilight of our tears.

I woke again upon a sunny morning,

Alive to what I hoped would be a song.

You were yesterday, which I remembered

As though it were a year or two ago.

Down to the depths of the sea

Down, down, down.

Down to the depths of the sea.

She sits at her wheel in the humming town,

Singing most joyfully.

Hark, what she sings: "O joy, O joy,

For the humming street, and the child with its toy.

For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well.

For the wheel where I spun,

And the blessed light of the sun."

And so she sings her fill,

Singing most joyfully,

Till the shuttle falls from her hand,

And the whizzing wheel stands still.

She steals to the window, and looks at the sand;

And over the sand at the sea;

And her eyes are set in a stare;

And anon there breaks a sigh,

And anon there drops a tear,

From a sorrow-clouded eye,

And a heart sorrow-laden,

A long, long sigh.

For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden,

And the gleam of her golden hair.

Bride of Quietness

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?