Angeli

You blessed spirits that bestow,
For every good or bad intent
Throughout our Universe below,
Either reward, or punishment;
You that instruct th'industrious sphears
(Your schollars) in a harmony
Which doth as far exceed the eares

On the mountain, in the valley,
Singing birds again do rally;
Now is seen
Clover green;
Winter, take away thy teen!
Trees that erst were gray to view
Now their verdant robes renew;
In their shade
Nests are made;
Thence the toll of May is paid.
Fought an aged wife for breath
Day and night, and baffled death;
Now she rushes
Like a ram about, and pushes
All the young ones into the bushes.

I

On the morning that a typhoon was blowing
I went to a neighboring stationer
and bought that foreign-made yellow pencil
as light as a cigarette,
the soft wood —
you burn the shavings
and they smell of Brahmanism.
I close my gate and think:
tomorrow morning, and it will be autumn.

II

I'd like to talk about copses and all that:
But I sat on a log and was thinking
" People are beginning to polish
gourds for the divine liquor.
The festival is so near at hand. "

On the morning
sky a stone of sun
shows its broad basalt
face on high
at the edge of a pool of obsidian,
and the mouth seems to pour
dribble of human blood
and helianthi of death. . . .

It is the great grindstone
of the solar corn
that makes the bread of days
in the mills of eternity.

Stone of chronologies,
synthesis of years and days,
breathing in silent song
the unconquerable dread
of old mythologies. . . .
On it the flowered and divining months
string pallid alabaster moons

On the long shore, lit by the moon
To show them properly alone,
Two lovers suddenly embraced
So that their shadows were as one.
The ordinary night was graced
For them by the swift tide of blood
That silently they took at flood,
And for a little time they prized
Themselves emparadised.

Then, as if shaken by stage-fright
Beneath the hard moon's bony light,
They stood together on the sand
Embarrassed in each other's sight
But still conspiring hand in hand,
Until they saw, there underfoot,

On the large highway of the awful air that flows
— Unbounded between sea and heaven, while twilight screened
The majestic distances, he moved and had repose;
On the huge wind of the Immensity he leaned
His steady body in long lapse of flight — and rose

Gradual, through broad gyres of ever-climbing rest,
Up the clear stair of the eternal sky, and stood
Throned on the summit! Slowly, with his widening breast,
Widened around him the enormous Solitude,
From the gray rim of ocean to the glowing west.

On the ground cedar and zelkova roots
entangling, robbing each other
stand out like terrifying veins
from the grass and moss of this lean soil,
in the sky, clouds silently flowing east,
the cedar top withered,
the zelkova tip looking as if
it lives on snatches it takes from the wind
...sometimes the cedar withers the zelkova
sometimes the zelkova withers the cedar. . . .
(Harvest the rice, eat the rice, what for?
Eat the rice, harvest the rice, what for?)
The technician shouts over there,

On the green banks of Shannon, when Sheelah was nigh,
No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I;
No harp like my own could so cheerily play,
And wherever I went was my poor dog Tray.

When at last I was forced from my Sheelah to part,
She said (while the sorrow was big at her heart),
" Oh! remember your Sheelah when far, far away;
And be kind, my dear Pat, to our poor dog Tray."

Poor dog! he was faithful and kind, to be sure,
And he constantly loved me, although I was poor;
When the sour-looking folk sent me heartless away,

On the grassy banks
Lambkins at their pranks;
Woolly sisters, woolly brothers,
Jumping off their feet
While their woolly mothers
Watch by them and bleat.

On the first of March
The craws begin to search.
By the first o April
They are sitting still.
By the first o May,
They're a flown away,
Croupin greedy back again
Wi October's wind and rain.