Short Poems

Things hard to say
are easily said
inside a mosquito net

Before we've had our fill,
must the moon so quickly
hide itself?
If only the rim of the hill
would flee and refuse it shelter!

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

They that eat the uncrushed grape
Walk with steady heels:
Lo, now, how they stare and gape
Where the poet reels!
He has drunk the sheer divine
Concentration of the vine.

They say the Phoenix is dying, some say dead.
Dead without issue is what one message said,
But that has been suppressed, officially denied.

I think, myself, the man who sent it lied.
In any case, I'm told, he has been shot,
As a precautionary measure, whether he did or not.

They met in passion; Satyrs of the glade
Indulged not in a wilder carnival.
But at the end love came and all was changed,
They parted with a kiss quite cold and sad.

They have put my bed beside the unpainted screen;
They have shifted my stove in front of the blue curtain.
I listen to my grandchildren, reading me a book;
I watch the servants, heating up my soup.
With rapid pencil I answer the poems of friends;
I feel in my pockets and pull out medicine-money.
When this superintendence of trifling affairs is done,
I lie back on my pillows and sleep with my face to the south.

They cannot wholly pass away,
How far soe'er above;
Nor we, the lingerers, wholly stay
Apart from those we love:
For spirits in eternity,
As shadows in the sun,
Reach backward into Time, as we,
Like lifted clouds, reach on.

They built the front, upon my word,
As fine as any abbey;
But thinking they might cheat the Lord,
They made the back part shabby.

These fell miasmic rings of mist, with ghoulish menace bound,
Like noose-horizons tightening my little world around,
They still the soaring will to wing, to dance, to speed away,
And fling the soul insurgent back into its shell of clay:

Beneath incrusted silences, a seething Etna lies,
The fire of whose furnaces may sleep — but never dies!