Crucifixion

By PIERRE LOVING

When you draw back your mare-white hands
Hooding your eyes that glow the ghost-heart of bitumen
Incanted in a thousand magic lands

From mountain bowels, you are but woman.

When you deflower the coral pout

Mayberry-puckered but not yet a kiss,

The soul within me turns and turns about

And peels the body's chrysalis.

Blood streams across the dim whey sky,
Obdurate clouds are split from east to west
And on the cross of twilight I

Am nailed, star-rivets in my breast.

Promise of Summer

By EDWARD SAPIR

Now in the chilly night of May

I am flooded with the babble of frogs.

It is the shrill chorus of priestesses

Wafting from the temple-door of summer,
Singing the rush of quickening green
And intoxicating gold.

The Winter of His Discontent

By JOHN MCCLURE

The autumn leaves were hardly falling,
The winter winds were hardly here,
When Thomas rose in his rebellion
Demanding springtime all the year.

And Thomas fret in his inglenook
Through the cold, cold winter night,
Demanding summer, demanding spring,
Demanding his birthright.

He heard a voice in the bracken calling, ("Gay Thomas! Gay Thomas!")

And Thomas thought it was Spring was calling (For the autumn leaves and the snow were falling. And it was winter here.)

Thomas A-Maying

By JOHN MCCLURE

Where is he was staying

With the King's daughter?

He has gone a-maying

Over salt water.

Where is he was praying

With a rabbit lip?

He has gone a-maying

In a tall ship.

The priest's in the chancel,
The girl's in the hall-
Farewell King's daughter,
Farewell all!

Psalms of the Sea

(Land-locked)

By EVERETT BOSTON

Because my mind had wearied me, because my eyes were tired,
I forsook the outward for the clearer inward vision of imagery:
And fools declared me dreaming.

The air became filled with the white remembered bitterness of salt:
Nasal, drawling speech filled and swept from the throats of men:
Cautions and maxims and rough laughter mingled

With the distant thunder of Eternity that roared from the Bay of Fundy
(whose very name on the lips of a lover is as the bellow of a fog horn)
Poverty had the glamour of daring; sorrow the utmost depths of tragedy;
And the children laughed only in pleasant weather.

I slept in my oil-skins in the stern of an open boat,

And the surges of my mother the sea lulled me to slumber;
While the bow worried and tugged at a mile of sagging net.

I raced my boat with the boats of my friends to the boat of the Dealer, And sold him ten pound Whitefish for ten cents each,

And then boasted because he had not paid me five cents.

Then I went inland to the houses of my kind, already longing anew for

the sea,

And the salt of the spray and the swing of the boat and the moan of

the wind,

and the peace of the distant beacon that blinked it's old message of maxim, "'Ware of the sea. Death is patient. God's will be done."

I have stood on the breakwater and snarled curses into the teeth of the storm

With my friends, while the women stood in silence, also staring into the storm

For the boat that had not come back.

I have prayed in the white Church on the hill.

And prayer had a new meaning because of the tears that splashed from the hard blue eyes of another,

When a bachelor of forty wept for the rival whose death
Robbed the woman they both loved of all peace.

I have gone to sea in the teeth of a storm,

For the sake of a baby who prattled of Daddy, and a woman who turned

her face away

And brought back a broken oar and a sodden cap

But dared not tell her.

I have laughed at the sea, loved her and left her.

And all for the sake of profit!

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tho' he gain all the world and lose his own soul?"

I shall go back to the chance of the sea,

To strong friends and honourable women,
Simplicity, coarse tobacco, and peace.

Old Woman Selling Fruit

By SIDNEY W. WALLACH

Your fingers move in cabalistic signs

Over the jumbled glory on the cart,

Caressing, as the doting scribe his lines,

What breathes a fragrance to your wrinkled heart,—
Incense to please the nostrils of a God.

What is the mobile gladness that you find

Throbbing beneath your touch? Why do you nod,

Happy to find the wares are smooth and kind.

The ponderous obscenity of years

Has never stained your slightness. Days have fled
Blowing a kiss that charms away your tears

To radiating happiness instead.

When everything you prayed for, was denied,
Did stroking apples leave you satisfied?

Economy

By YONE NOGUCHI

How could one who is about my age waste his emotion!
The dissipation of words for me is already a thing of the past;
My Creed of today is nothing but the word "economy."
Laugh at my sobriety, laugh at my cowardice, if you like,

I will gladly accept it as a representative of middle age.

I too, like yourself, had the age of spring,

When my emotion, as if flying petals in the wind,

Scattered itself on the green rugs of grass,

I always ready then to waste anything, however costly it might be.
Never thought about a possible reward for my emotion.

How talkative I was at that time,

I played the libertine, I was proud of my wealth of words,

And left it freely to everybody's sense of smell,

As if it were a flower's perfume falling on the garden-face.

Very likely such is the case with you today,

And it's natural enough for you as an owner of the age of spring.

If you fear to commit a sin of waste and dissipation,

That means to be a blasphemy toward God who gave you this springtime. But you should know that in a twinkling

You have to enter the green-leafed age of early summer,

And when grown to my age, you will be thankful for your sins of spring. Suppose you have no history of dissipation and waste,

How lonely you would be when you were about my age.

I praise, I adore your age of spring,

Because I would like to drink the reminiscence-sweetness of the past. You must not be afraid, you must not shrink,

Sobriety and cowardice come to you, though unbidden, when you grow to

my age.

You must live perfectly in the age of spring,

If not, you will be sorry for it in after time.

I myself do not fear of dissipation and waste,

But I am already in the age when I cannot stand them.

The seeds in my palm are, alas, running low,

I carefully drop them one by one,

And hardly daring to move, watch patiently how they begin to bud.