Blown Asters

When the dynasty of my future comes,

Fair with its beauty, fresh with its time,

I will look back, bedecked, knowing I chose

What was the right, and never chose the wrong.

But deep in my soul I will feel the pull,

Of a thing half sacred and sublime,

Slumbering like the bloom of asters

When the snow is gone, and the spring is young.

I picked the freshest fruit on the bending bough,

The thorns I could not pass, I left,

Only because I was vulnerable to loss,

Because I never knew, nor even know now.

The world around me said, “You never shall be,

But always must come to our regular path,

Ruined gardens are the deaths of many a girl

But not what your innocent feet should allow.”

The paths of my life are not in disarray,

They range themselves in harmony and joy;

I almost feel a sense of pride at times

For my glittering sunlight, like fair alloy.

Yet sometimes when the dawn on golden cobbles wakes,

There is a shimmer of the days when it was near;

A peasant in a coat of tatters was my king,

Years by years that never were my years.

Withered Things

Through a barren field, where frost coats the ground
Cold footsteps lie imprinted in the dirt,
Silence---if it was a sound
Is ignored and thought inert.
Against the shadow of a scarecrow in the air
The winds of promise and the thoughts of sun
Gather there, while ravens unaware
Perch upon his shoulder, dark to dun.
Away through amber clouds, away through honest skies
The passage of a heron traces wings
Calligraphy of light before it died
The novel of a life past withered things.

Anonymous

Somewhere a light burns through mist gray waves,
The stars are lost like forgotten graves,
And a single ship, past the silver shore
Bobs and banks, and is no more.
I shielded my eyes there a summer by,
When the foam was brown like a drunkard's dye;
The heaving of breath in the heart of the sea
Seemed like the lungs that were lifting in me.
Somewhere the clouds crack the broken moon;
There is silence---the silence before a monsoon---
But the gulls drift on, and the soft wind sweeps
Waking the winter before she sleeps.

Windowsill Winter Plant

How do you live inside the spring?
When the ice is thick on a sparrow's wing,
When the wind is harsh with the breath of God,
And a beggar mutters on frozen sod.
How do you live inside the spring?
By taking a jar of dying things,
The seeds of kings and the buds of queens,
And watching them sprout to a tender green.

Crooked

Every day that the white snows blow,
Bright against the tarnished rust red of the sun,
Specks on the plate of the moon at dusk,
A tree bends against a sky of dun.
How many fingers felt moisture in the air
Holding the earth, still wet from the rains?
How many hearts beat softy as one
When seeds still specked the burnished grains?
Every season that October cries,
Though the years draw by and the grasses die,
Pieces of life seem to come undone,
From the crooked tree in its browning sky.

An Irish Slumber

Sleep, sleep, when the sun is burning on the western sky,
Gold, scarlet, gray, blue, dipping the world in silver dye;
Dark crosses silhouetted in the fading light
Churchyard spires fires made eyes within the night.
Slumber sweetly in the heart's forgetting,
When the last soft swipe is dimly setting;
Dream, dream, of soldiers who went before,
Sleeping in the heath, then dying on the moor.

When the Summer Was Young

A little bluebird spoke to me
Long ago, in a sycamore tree
When the wind was soft,
And the summers sweet
And the children played in the shining creek.
"Winter is old," he sang to the sky,
While the breeze blew the clouds and the sunlight by
And a meadowlark swayed in the heart of the rye,
"Winter is old, and summer is nigh."
A little bluebird in a crooked limb
Sang a song that made sense to him
But now all the trees are dark and dim
And the silence of creeks seems somehow a sin.

Blossom in the Snow

Through the leaves and roads I wander,
Under stars I take my cover,
Lost in silence, pushed by thunder,
Ever walking, ever cold.
Winter weather sends December,
Bright and sharp with frosted lovers
Matching snowflakes sort and sever;
Ever walking, ever cold.
Memories I had while sleeping
Seem to haunt me in the morning;
Both my feet are torn and bleeding:
Ever walking, ever cold.
In the white, I pluck a flower,
Like a final springtime warning:
God alone perceived this hour
Ever walking, ever cold. 

Leaves of Lights

In the glade, I met my lover:
The willow tree, fierce and strong,
With branches soft and warm for cover,
And roots that spread out wide and long.
Soon the winter will come in shrieking,
Windy and full of its cruel black nights,
But deep in my dreams I'll be secretly seeking,
My willow tree with its leaves of lights.

9th of August

I remember you in the turn of the leaves,
When the branches shed their silent leaves,
And the moon is bright as a golden plate---
Your birthday, I think, came two months too late.
I remember you when the winter is falling,
Shrouded in snow, while the ravens are calling,
No longer larks from some August refrain,
But black like the dimness you felt in the rain.
I remember you in the blossoms, yet burning,
Soft red things dropping petals at morning,
Scarlet, and full, with five roots in the sod,
Like the small, happy roots you offered back to God.
I remember you most when the warmth is coming,
When the sun is high and the wind is humming,
On the 9th of August, I can only remember
What made that summer as cold as December.