good.There is something I want to feel in my running blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret.
I will trail my hands again through the drenched, cold leaves
Till my hands are full of the chillness and touch of leaves,
Till at length they induce me to sleep, and to forget.
A Baby Asleep After Pain
As a drenched, drowned bee
Hangs numb and heavy from a bending flower,
So clings to me
My baby, her brown hair brushed with wet tears
And laid against her cheek;
Her soft white legs hanging heavily over my arm
Swinging heavily to my movement as I walk.
My sleeping baby hangs upon my life,
Like a burden she hangs on me.
She has always seemed so light,
But now she is wet with tears and numb with pain
Even her floating hair sinks heavily,
Reaching downwards;
As the wings of a drenched, drowned bee
Are a heaviness, and a weariness.
Anxiety
The hoar-frost crumbles in the sun,
The crisping steam of a train
Melts in the air, while two black birds
Sweep past the window again.
Along the vacant road, a red
Bicycle approaches; I wait
In a thaw of anxiety, for the boy
To leap down at our gate.
He has passed us by; but is it
Relief that starts in my breast?
Or a deeper bruise of knowing that still
She has no rest.
The Punisher
I have fetched the tears up out of the little wells,
Scooped them up with small, iron words,
Dripping over the runnels.
The harsh, cold wind of my words drove on, and still
I watched the tears on the guilty cheek of the boys
Glitter and spill.
Cringing Pity, and Love, white-handed, came
Hovering about the Judgment which stood in my eyes,
Whirling a flame.
. . . . . . .
The tears are dry, and the cheeks' young fruits are fresh
With laughter, and clear the exonerated eyes, since pain
Beat through the flesh.
The Angel of Judgment has departed again to the Nearness.
Desolate I am as a church whose lights are put out.
And night enters in drearness.
The fire rose up in the bush and blazed apace,
The thorn-leaves crackled and twisted and sweated in anguish;
Then God left the place.
Like a flower that the frost has hugged and let go, my head
Is heavy, and my heart beats slowly, laboriously,
My strength is shed.
The End
If I could have put you in my heart,
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,
How glad I should have been!
And now the chart
Of memory unrolls again to me
The course of our journey here, before we had to part.
And oh, that you had never, never been
Some of your selves, my love, that some
Of your several faces I had never seen!
And still they come before me, and they go,
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,
And have not any longer any hope
To heal the suffering, or make requite
For all your life of asking and despair,
I own that some of me is dead to-night.
The Bride
My love looks like a girl to-night,
But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
