Short Poems

Here a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray be silent, and not stir
Th'easy earth that covers her.

Scobble for whoredom whips his wife and cries
He'll slit her nose; but blubbering she replies,
"Good sir, make no more cuts i' th' outward skin,
One slit's enough to let adultery in.

We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.

The thought beneath so slight a film
Is more distincly seen, --
As laces just reveal the surge,
Or mists the Apennine.

The show is not the show,
But they that go.
Menagerie to me
My neighbor be.
Fair play--
Both went to see.

The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.

An everywhere of silver,
With ropes of sand
To keep it from effacing
The track called land.

The body,
Eternal Shadow of the finite Soul,
The Soul's self-symbol, its image of itself.
Its own yet not itself--

"With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw."