Wild Orphan

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1. Wild Swans I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. And what did I see I had not seen before? Only a question less or a question more: Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying. Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, House without air, I leave you and lock your door. Wild […]...
2. One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things seem filled with the intent To be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: Places, […]...
3. The Little Orphan The crowded street his playground is, a patch of blue his sky; A puddle in a vacant lot his sea where ships pass by: Poor little orphan boy of five, the city smoke and grime Taint every cooling breeze he gets throughout the summer time; And he is just as your boy is, a child […]...
4. To An Orphan Child A Whimsey AH, child, thou art but half thy darling mother’s; Hers couldst thou wholly be, My light in thee would outglow all in others; She would relive to me. But niggard Nature’s trick of birth Bars, lest she overjoy, Renewal of the loved on earth Save with alloy. The Dame has no regard, alas, […]...
5. The Suicide's Argument Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no No question was asked me it could not be so! If the life was the question, a thing sent to try And to live on be YES; what can NO be? to die. NATURE’S ANSWER Is’t returned, as ’twas sent? Is’t no worse […]...
6. The Wild Common The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping, Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep? […]...
7. Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women (from a song) Perhaps I was born kneeling, Born coughing on the long winter, Born expecting the kiss of mercy, Born with a passion for quickness And yet, as things progressed, I learned early about the stockade Or taken out, the fume of the enema. By two or three I learned not to kneel, Not […]...
8. An Orphan's Lament She’s gone and twice the summer’s sun Has gilt Regina’s towers, And melted wild Angora’s snows, And warmed Exina’s bowers. The flowerets twice on hill and dale Have bloomed and died away, And twice the rustling forest leaves Have fallen to decay, And thrice stern winter’s icy hand Has checked the river’s flow, And three […]...
9. Orphan School Full fifty merry maids I heard One summer morn a-singing; And each was like a joyous bird With spring-clear not a-ringing. It was an old-time soldier song That held their happy voices: Oh how it’s good to swing along When youth rejoices! Then lo! I dreamed long years had gone, They passed again ungladly. Their […]...
10. Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight Beyond the ledges of concrete Restaurants fall into dreams With candlelight couples Lost Alexandria still burns In a billion lightbulbs Lives cross lives Idling at stoplights Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs ‘Souls eat souls in the general emptiness’ A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window A yogi […]...
11. The Wild Iris At the end of my suffering There was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun Flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive As consciousness Buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which […]...
12. Piping Down the Valleys Wild Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again.’ So I piped: he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy […]...
13. Does It Matter? Does it matter?-losing your legs? For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs. Does it matter?-losing you sight? There’s such splendid work for the blind; And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace […]...
14. The Orphan My father and mother are dead, Nor friend, nor relation I know; And now the cold earth is their bed, And daisies will over them grow. I cast my eyes into the tomb, The sight made me bitterly cry; I said, “And is this the dark room, Where my father and mother must lie?” I […]...
15. Song Of The Orphan I am no one and never will be anyone, For I am far too small to claim to be; Not even later. Mothers and Fathers, Take pity on me. I fear it will not pay to raise me: I shall fall victim to the mower’s scythe. No one can find me useful now: I am […]...
16. Dolphin My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, A captive as Racine, the man of craft, Drawn through his maze of iron composition By the incomparable wandering voice of Phиdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body Caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines, The glassy bowing and scraping of my […]...
17. Thread the sky is shattered Its debris Clutters the world’s streets Where the light came from Is a question Charred beyond recognition Heads hang out of walls Limbs unattached Rigid in their will to crawl away But there’s a bird (black In the jagged sky) With a twig still stuck in its beak Is it falling […]...
18. Hymn 93 Christ, or Wisdom, obeyed or resisted. Prov. 8:34-36. Thus saith the Wisdom of the Lord, “Blest is the man that hears my word, Keeps daily watch before my gates, And at my feet for mercy waits. “The soul that seeks me shall obtain Immortal wealth and heav’nly gain; Immortal life is his reward; Life, and […]...
19. Sonnet 23 – Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead, Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine? And would the sun for thee more coldly shine Because of grave-damps falling round my head? I marvelled, my Beloved, when I read Thy thought so in the letter. I am thine- But. . . so much to […]...
20. The Call Of The Wild Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on, Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, Searched the Vastness for a […]...
21. Wild Dark Love Song Her man, A wild dark love song Borne deep within her gypsy soul He’s gone to live in jagged mountains Where salmon jump and sing In tarns High above The cloud lines Beyond the silver moon In the shadow of the Cader Idris In misty mountains Where meadowlarks are known to wing And wild geese […]...
22. Such Singing in the Wild Branches It was spring And finally I heard him Among the first leaves – Then I saw him clutching the limb In an island of shade With his red-brown feathers All trim and neat for the new year. First, I stood still And thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with […]...
23. Sonnet XXII: Wild Is the Foaming Sea Wild is the foaming Sea! The surges roar! And nimbly dart the livid lightnings round! On the rent rock the angry waves rebound; Ah me! the less’ning bark is seen no more! Along the margin of the trembling shore, Loud as the blast my frantic cries shall sound, My storm-drench’d limbs the flinty fragments wound, […]...
24. The peace of wild things When despair grows in me And I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the […]...
25. Wild Grapes What tree may not the fig be gathered from? The grape may not be gathered from the birch? It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch. As a girl gathered from the birch myself Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn, I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of. […]...
26. A Strange Wild Song He thought he saw an Elephant That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. “At length I realize,” he said, “The bitterness of life!” He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His Sister’s Husband’s Niece. “Unless you […]...
27. Struck, was I, not yet by Lightning Struck, was I, not yet by Lightning Lightning lets away Power to perceive His Process With Vitality. Maimed was I yet not by Venture Stone of stolid Boy Nor a Sportsman’s Peradventure Who mine Enemy? Robbed was I intact to Bandit All my Mansion torn Sun withdrawn to Recognition Furthest shining done Yet was not […]...
28. By the Hoof of the Wild Goat By the Hoof of the Wild Goat uptossed From the cliff where she lay in the Sun Fell the Stone To the Tarn where the daylight is lost, So she fell from the light of the Sun And alone! Now the fall was ordained from the first With the Goat and the Cliff and the […]...
29. Wild With All Regrets (Another version of “A Terre”.) To Siegfried Sassoon My arms have mutinied against me brutes! My fingers fidget like ten idle brats, My back’s been stiff for hours, damned hours. Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease. I can’t read. There: it’s no use. Take your book. A short life and a merry one, my […]...
30. Refuted ‘Anticipation is sweeter than realisation.’ It may be, yet I have not found it so. In those first golden dreams of future fame I did not find such happiness as came When toil was crowned with triumph. Now I know My words have recognition, and will go Straight to some listening heart, my early aim, […]...
31. Two Graves First Ghost To sepulcher my mouldy bones I bough a pile of noble stones, And half a year a sculptor spent To hew my marble monument, The stateliest to rear its head In all this city of the dead. And generations passing through Will gape, and ask: What did he do To earn this tomb […]...
32. A Prayer Since that I may not have Love on this side the grave, Let me imagine Love. Since not mine is the bliss Of ‘claspt hands and lips that kiss,’ Let me in dreams it prove. What tho’ as the years roll No soul shall melt to my soul, Let me conceive such thing; Tho’ never […]...
33. The Mole Said he: “I’ll dive deep in the Past, And write a book of direful days When summer skies were overcast With smoke of humble hearths ablaze; When War was rampant in the land, And poor folk cowered in the night, While ruin gaped on every hand – Of ravishing and wrath I’ll write.” Ten years […]...
34. From 'Pauline&#039 O God, where does this tend-these struggling aims? What would I have? What is this ‘sleep’, which seems To bound all? can there be a ‘waking’ point Of crowning life? The soul would never rule – It would be first in all things-it would have Its utmost pleasure filled,-but that complete Commanding for commanding sickens […]...
35. The Old King's New Jester You that in vain would front the coming order With eyes that meet forlornly what they must, And only with a furtive recognition See dust where there is dust,- Be sure you like it always in your faces, Obscuring your best graces, Blinding your speech and sight, Before you seek again your dusty places Where […]...
36. Wild May Aleta mentions in her tender letters, Among a chain of quaint and touching things, That you are feeble, weighted down with fetters, And given to strange deeds and mutterings. No longer without trace or thought of fear, Do you leap to and ride the rebel roan; But have become the victim of grim care, With […]...
37. Revulsion THOUGH I waste watches framing words to fetter Some spirit to mine own in clasp and kiss, Out of the night there looms a sense ’twere better To fail obtaining whom one fails to miss. For winning love we win the risk of losing, And losing love is as one’s life were riven; It cuts […]...
38. Wild Oats About twenty years ago Two girls came in where I worked – A bosomy English rose And her friend in specs I could talk to. Faces in those days sparked The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt If ever one had like hers: But it was the friend I took out, And in seven years […]...
39. Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body Love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. […]...
40. Water makes many Beds Water makes many Beds For those averse to sleep Its awful chamber open stands Its Curtains blandly sweep Abhorrent is the Rest In undulating Rooms Whose Amplitude no end invades Whose Axis never comes....