Beyond the porcelain fence of the pleasure garden,
I hear the frogs in the blue-green rice-fields;
But the sword-shaped moon
Has cut my heart in two.

Wild eyes—and faces ashen grey
That strain through lofty prison bars
To see the everlasting stars,
Then turn—to slumber as we may:

Even as we are, so are they,
And here is peace for all who know
The stars still follow where we go,
When heaven and earth have passed away.

Obedient to the unknown Power,
From out the ruin of a world
A clustered galaxy is hurled
To glimmer through its steadfast hour:

The blazing sun of Shakespeare's soul
Shattered to star-dust, fills again
With meteor-flights the immortal brain

Is that you sistah Harris?
I knowed you when you knocked;
Jest keep right on a-pushing,
The ole door isn't locked!

Ole white man's been forgetting,
Each day since first I sent;
He's got a pow'ful mem'ry,
When comes the time for rent.

Now, sit down; Whut's your hurry?
You have no work to do;
I'm mos' done with my i'ning;
You always beats me through.

You aint no bother to me!
Jest sit here where its cool;
Hush fretting 'bout them child'en!
You know they're safe in school.

Now, whut's the news, Amanda?

I sleep. The panoply of sense,
The buffetings, the din,
The breasts of love, the battle dense,
The roaring drive I know not whence,
The riot curbed within,
Cease, and in dreamless innocence
The Self forgets its sin;
Forgets, unloosing like a robe,
The body and its grief,
Till at the Dawn over the globe
(That soft and silver thief!)
It wakes; nor ever eye can probe
Where it has found relief.

I die. The treasure-ships I sought,
The glories and the glee,
The lives wherewith my own was wrought
(As in some tapestry gem-fraught)

Learn the grandiose manner
and the unending Orphic line.

Idolize a master
and attach yourself to one tit (one is plenty).

Represent the weakness of the age.

Keep at it for forty years
(preferably underground)

Only a few could understand his ways and his outfit queer,
His saddle-horse and his pack-horse as lean as a Winter steer,
As he rode alone on the mesa intent on his endless quest—
Old Tom Bright of the Pecos, a ghost of the vanished West.

His gaze was fixed on the spaces; he never had much to say
When we met him down by the river, or over in Santa Fé.
He favored the open country with its reaches clean and wide,
And called it his “sage-brush garden; the only place left to ride.”

He scorned new methods and manners and stock that was under fence.

The wild war over, England takes her rest
Sick of mad bloodshed, sick too of display
Of sunlit flags that preach from day to day
Imperial lessons—aye, but not those best
Mandates of Empire that from crest to crest
Of Wordsworth's mountains thundered to the spray
Of wayes that wash round headland, beach and bay,
Of England, by her Freedom crowned and blest.

Yet what is this that rises like a wraith
Standing between us and the gold-robed form
Of Peace, with eyes that darken into storm
And hands made red with horror of grim death?

Mary was busy and hurried,
Serving the Friend divine,
Cleansing the cups and the platters,
Bringing the bread and the wine;
But Martha was careful and anxious,
Fretted in thought and in word,
She had no time to be learning
While she was serving the Lord,
For Martha was “cumbered” with serving
Martha was “troubled” with “things”—
Those that would pass with the using—
She was forgetting her wings.

But Mary was quiet and peaceful,
Learning to love and to live,
Mary was learning His precepts,
Mary was letting Him give—

There cam' a strange wight to our town en',
An' the fient a body did him ken;
He tirled na lang, but he glided ben,
Wi' a weary, dreary hum.

His face did glow like the glow o' the west,
When the drumly cloud has it half o'ercast;
Or the struggling moon when she's sair distrest,
O, sirs! 'twas Aiken-drum.

I trow the bauldest stood aback,
Wi' a gape an' a glower till their lugs did crack,
As the shapeless phantom mumblin' spak'—
“Hae ye wark for Aiken-drum?”

O! had ye seen the bairns' fright
As they stared at the wild and unearthly wight:

Serene descent, as a red leaf's descending
When there is neither wind nor noise of rain,
But only autum air and the unending
Drawing of all things to the earth again.

So be it, let the snow fall deep and cover
All that was drunken once with light and air.
The earth will not regret her tireless lover,
Nor he awake to know she does not care.