Adelaide Crapsey

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

Scarlet the poppies
Blue the corn-flowers,
Golden the wheat.
Gold for The Eternal:
Blue of Our Lady:
Red for the five
Wounds of her Son.

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

Seen on a Night in November How frail
Above the bulk

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

The poet pursues his beautiful theme;
The preacher his golden beatitude;
And I run after a vanishing dream—
The glittering, will-o’-the-wispish gleam
Of the properly scholarly attitude—
The highly desirable, the very advisable,
The hardly acquirable, properly scholarly attitude.

With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.

Written in A Moment of Exasperation How can you lie so still? All day I watch
And never a blade of all the green sod moves
To show where restlessly you toss and turn,
And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees

Well and
If day on day
Follows, and weary year
On year. . and ever days and years. .
Well?

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow. . the hour
Before the dawn. . the mouth of one
Just dead.