Читать книгу Kentucky Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 11

Behold the blossom-bosomed Day again,

With all the star-white Hours in her train,

Laughs out of pearl-lights through a golden ray,

That, leaning on the woodland wildness, blends

A sprinkled amber with the showers that lay

Their oblong emeralds on the leafy ends.

Behold her bend with maiden-braided brows

Above the wildflower, sidewise with its strain

Of dewy happiness, to kiss again

Each drop to death; or, under rainy boughs,

With fingers, fragrant as the woodland rain,

Gather the sparkles from the sycamore,

To set within each core

Of crimson roses girdling her hips,

Where each bud dreams and drips.

Smoothing her blue-black hair, – where many a tusk

Of iris flashes, – like the falchions' sheen

Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen, —

Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk,

That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk

With footsteps of the flowers on the banks?

Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?

Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare

A festival each weed's invited to.

Each bee is drunken with the honied air:

And all the air is eloquent with blue.

The wet hay glitters, and the harvester

Tinkles his scythe, – as twinkling as the dew, —

That shall not spare

Blossom or brier in its sweeping path;

And, ere it cut one swath,

Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.

What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade?

A Dryad's lips, who slumbers in the shade?

A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath

Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls

The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls?

A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth doth breathe

Her viewless presence near us, unafraid?

Or troops of ghosts of blooms, that whitely wade

The brook? whose wisdom knows no other song

Than that the bird sings where it builds beneath