Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step, She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage To meet him in the doorway with the news And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’ She pushed him outward with her through the door And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said. She took the market things from Warren’s arms And set them on the porch, then drew him down To sit beside her on the wooden steps.
‘When was I ever anything but kind to him? But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said. ‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I? If he left then, I said, that ended it.
Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And every where that Mary went The lamb was sure to go; He followed her to school one day — That was against the rule, It made the children laugh and play To see a lamb at school.
And so the Teacher turned him out, But still he lingered near, And waited patiently about, Till Mary did appear. And then he ran to her and laid
Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters Always out of office hours running with her social betters But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her It was that look within her eye Why did it always seem to say goodbye?
Joan her name was and at lunchtime Solitary solitary
With one black shadow at its feet, The house thro' all the level shines, Close-latticed to the brooding heat, And silent in its dusty vines: A faint-blue ridge upon the right, An empty river-bed before, And shallows on a distant shore, In glaring sand and inlets bright.
When my grave is broke up again Some second guest to entertain, (For graves have learn'd that woman head, To be to more than one a bed) And he that digs it, spies A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, Will he not let'us alone, And think that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their souls, at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
If this fall in a time, or land, Where mis-devotion doth command, Then he, that digs us up, will bring
"Why did you melt your waxen man Sister Helen? To-day is the third since you began." "The time was long, yet the time ran, Little brother." (O Mother, Mary Mother, Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
Because the ostracized experience the world in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it clearly yet with such anger and longing that they sometimes enlarge what they see, she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls. She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.
How startling, though, no one knew about her past,
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