Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain
When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight, I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die.

~Uncertain

A Question

A voice said, "Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, Men of Earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth."

Robert Frost

This is what I deserve.
For thinking I could give my heart
To you.
Betrayal. Hatred. Anger.
Do you feel it too?

The Question

The question:
the boy.
Why him?
Why me?
Why then?
Why now?
Did he ever love me?

It is over.
I loved him.
It is over.
This ache.
Hot tears, even now.
Why now?

What if things had been different?
What if I had held on longer,
What if I had done more?
What if I had never done anything,
Blew him off from the start.
Perhaps I should have.
Perhaps not.
I know that it is better to have loved
And lost...
But it is worse to feel so lost.
It is worse to feel this way.

Pain.
Silence.
Night.

What do I entertain you?
WHAT AM I?
WHY?

Just leave me to the silence,
Prison that it is to me.

Much Madness is divinest Sense–
To a discerning Eye–
Much Sense–the starkest Madness–
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail–
Assent–and you are sane–
Demur–you’re straightway dangerous–
And handled with a Chain–

Emily Dickenson

The Common Cold

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!


Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.


Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.


A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

-Odgen Nash
(That was for you, Amanda)

My mother said
That I never should
Play with the gypsies
In the wood;
If I did she would say,
Naughty girl to disobey.
Your hair shan't curl,
Your shoes shan't shine,
You naughty girl
You shan't be mine.
My father said
That if I did
He'd bang my head
With the teapot lid.

The wood was dark
The grass was green,
Up comes Sally
With a tambourine;
Alpaca frock,
New scarf-shawl,
White straw bonnet
And a pink parasol.
I went to the river-
No ship to get across
I paid ten shillings
For an old blind horse;
I up on his back
And off in a crack,
Sally tell my mother
I shall never come back.

-Anon. (but found in a book of Nursery Rhymes for children in the section "Playtime")

The Star-Splitter

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
BUsy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These foreves are obliged to pay respect to."
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
He burned his house down for fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.

"What do you want with one of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"

"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his famr and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me."
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
And he could wait-we'd see him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself one. Well, all we said was
HE took a stange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn't sentient; the house
Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets
Was setting, up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.

He goit a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three, the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared to splitting wood.

We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know anybetter where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?


~Robert Frost

You say you fight demons.
You say you live in your own private hell.
You say you have too much going on.
You're afraid of hurting me.

You won't.
We both have too much going on.
You live in life, which yes, can be hell.
But only angels can fight demons.
And you won't trust them.

Not As Good But Just as Old

The seven seasick sailors
Asked a maid to tea
They coughed and laughed and sputtered
Then sailed off to sea

Twelve mysterious druids
Walked in a perfect line
They chanted and they muttered
And took themselves through time

The reapers named their Harvest
Dawn, Dusk and Evening Light
They threw their harvest to the sky
To separate the day and night.

The lizards in the graveyard
Feast on some unholy things
The phantoms keep them company
And the ghost-child softly sings.

Coven witches grouching
Their culdron always hot
Killing frogs and casting spells
Enchanting all the lot

The sun and moon danced merrily
The sky changed blue to black
The clouds rolled in, the clouds rolled out
The Harvest has come back.

A single poet sat and thought
Alive but all alone
And waiting wanting wishing
She sent herself home.

Time. Time mends everything doesn’t it?
We become old and decrepit, losing memories along with our minds.
Time passes and heals old wounds, the pains and tears of the past.
But the cost is great too…we age.
Age comes and strength leaves, time is a blanket long stifling us.
Still memory lives on for a while.
Memory of frog-hunting summers,
always alone,
always in a wood somewhere
down a little dirt road in the backwoods,
eating wild strawberries
whispering to the trees and wind,
searching for the magic deep within the forest never found.
The seagulls singing in the sunshine and the waves upon the shore.
Sailboats and their masts…
koolaid in the grass
and exploring the swampy marshes.
Then fall came with pumpkin faces and fields a-harvest.
The geese followed each other over the moors,
over the forests,
and the owls went to their secret owl-haven
deep within the trees.
The leaves caught fire crimson and gold
and dropped frosted to the ground.
Did Tchaikovsky’s fairies do their dance in enchanting fall to winter?
The crickets ceased their chirping,
and the waves stopped frozen into
but an echo of the far off distant waves, underneath the ice.
The snow comes, but the trees harbor from the wind.
Out of the forests in the fields and moors
wind cuts like a knife bleeding the skin cold to ice.
Shatters into an ice-cold silver sky fading into grey.
Even the moon cried in agony.
Amid the drear and cold a warmth grew…
like a seed it sprouted and songs
and hymns were sung as church bells rang and trees were decorated and everyone…everyone seemed happy.
Then the winds returned in their hatred
of the rapturiously joyful sight and people
brought out boxes of photographs
remembering the days of summer.
The only joy of winter is getting out of it.
The warmth of going inside
and eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate
and snorily sleeping the days away
is the only counterpart to such a merciless wind.
Sleep and dreams take you to far away places
with alligators and roses and starry starry skies.
CRACK the dawn awakes with a sunshine
and the ice BREAKS and you pick up your spirits from the floor
put them on snuggily and know deep within you that spring and love and hope came with the morning.
The snow falls like leaves of autumn from the trees in clumps and rain begins,
refilling the marshes and waking forest branches like a morning shower.
Cold at first but warming us back into summer with green leafbuds…
Memory is times’ nemesis, but time defeats memory
and at the end we die, passing into darkness of the unknown…
because nothing lasts forever.
That summer is over and winter was but a dream,
spring a relief all too long ago experienced.
The sailboats crashed upon the rocks.
The forests have been cut and the marshes have been drained.
The child grew up a long time ago.
She experienced demands and boys and money and expectations and became lost forever in the Illusion of Life.
And all that remains now is the old woman inside me,
smoking her cigar and stroking her cat
as the petunias kiss the sunset
and she mumbles soft insanities to herself.

Alice crept out of the rabbit hole.
The sunshine swept into the corridor of vines in front of her.
Go foreward
She thought,
And I will lose all that was in the world behind me.
Go backward,
And I may never see sunshine again...

Cry Baby, Cry

The king of Marigold in the kitchen
Cooking breakfast for the queen.
The queen was in the parlour
Playing piano for the children of the king.

The king was in the garden
Picking flowers for a friend who came to play.
The queen was in the playroom
Painting pictures for the children's holiday.

The dutchess of Kikaldy
Always smiling and arriving late for tea.
The duke was having problems
With a message at the local bird and bee.

At twelve o clock a meeting round the table
For a seance in the dark.
With voices out of nowhere put on specially
By the children for a lark.

Cry baby, cry.
Make your mother sigh.
You're old enough to know better.
So cry baby, cry.

Can you take me back where I came from?
Can you take me back?

~ Lennon