This View’s Poetry  


    Village in Late Summer    
         
   

Lips half-willing in a doorway.
Lips half-singing at a window.
Eyes half-dreaming in the walls.
Feet half-dancing in a kitchen.
Even the clocks half-yawn the hours
And the farmers make half-answers.

   
         
    Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)    
   

Cornhuskers (1918) # 10

   

    Scherzo    
         
   

The Elder’s bridal in July,
Bright as a cloud!
A ripe blonde girl,
Billowing to the ground in foamy petticoats,
With breasts full-blown
Swelling her bodice.

But later
When the small black-ruddy berries
Tempt the birds to strip the stems,
And the leaves begin to yellow and fall off
While late summer’s still in its green,
Then you look lank and used up,
Elder;
Your big bones stick out,
You’re the kind of woman
Wears bleak at forty.

I’ll take my constant pleasure
In a willow-tree that ripples silver
All the summer.
And when the winter comes in greasy rags
Like a half-naked beggar,
Lets out the plaited splendor
Of her bright and glancing hair.

   
         
    Clara Shanafelt    
   

The New Poetry: An Anthology (1917) # 332
ed. Harriet Monroe

   

    Sumach and Birds    
         
   

If you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
Shining in the six o’clock September dusk:
If the red sumach on the autumn roads
Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes:
If the red-haws never burst in a million
Crimson fingertwists of your heartcrying:
If all this beauty of yours never crushed me
Then there are many flying acres of birds for me,
Many drumming gray wings going home I shall see,
Many crying voices riding the north wind.

   
         
    Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)    
   

Smoke and Steel (1922) # 20

   

    Triad    
         
    From the Silence of Time, Time’s Silence borrow.
In the heart of To-day is the word of To-morrow.
The Builders of Joy are the Children of Sorrow.
   
         
    William Sharp (1856-1902)    
   

Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse p. 400
ed. D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee

   



  This View’s Poetry