In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
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I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled.
And I hunger.I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry.I hunger.My eyes are caked with dust of oatfields at harvest-time.I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields of other harvesters.It would be good to see…
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,Failed in its function as the autumn rake;Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to takeAll water from the streams; dead birds were foundIn wells a hundred feet below the ground–Such was the season when the flower bloomed.Old folks were startled, and…
Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal
Not all wood takes to fire from a match,Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal.The wood and coal in question caught a flameAnd flared up beautifully, touching the airThat takes a flame from anything.Somehow the fire was furnaced,And then the time was ripe for some to say,“Right banking of the furnace saves the…
To those fixed on white,
To those fixed on black,It is the same,And red is red,Yellow, yellow-Surely there are such sightsIn the many colored world,Or in the mind.The strange thing is thatThese people never see themselvesOr you, or me.Are they not in their minds?Are we not in the world?This is a curious blindnessFor those that are color blind.What queer beliefsThat…
There is no transcience of twilight in
No flicker of a slender flame in space,In crucibles, fragility crystalline.There is no fragrance of the jessamineAbout you, no pathos of some old placeAt dusk, that crumbles like moth-eater laceBeneath the touch. Nor has there ever been.Your love is like the folk-song’s flaming riseIn cane-lipped southern people, like their soulWhich burst its bondage in a…
Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Cloine tires,Holding her lips apart.Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon,Miracle made vesper-keeps,Cloine sleeps,And I’ll be sleeping soon.Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters whtere the moonwaves start,Radiant, resplendently she gleams,Cloine dreams,Lips pressed against my heart.