Teray faraq kay lamhay shumaar kartay howay
Bikhar gay hain tera intazaar kartay howay
Tou main bhi khush hoon koi us say ja kar kah day
Ager wo khush hay mujhay bey qaraar kartay howay
Main muskurata howa aainay main ubhroon ga
Woh ro paray ge achanak singhar kartay howay
Tujhay khaber he nahi koe toot gia hay
Mohabbatoon ko bohat paedaar kartay howay
Woh kah rahe the sumander nahi hai aankhoon main
Main un main doob gia ahtabaar kartay howay
Mujhay khaber thi kah ab loot kar na aaonga
Tuj ko yaad kia dard paar kartay howay...!!!
x............x............x

ab Kay Yoon Dil Ko Saza Di Hum Nay !

Us Ki Her Baat Bhula Di Hum Nay !

Eik , Eik Phool Bohat Yaad Aaya !

Shakh-E-Gul Jab Woh Jala Di Hum Nay !

Aaj Tak Jis Pay Woh Shermatay Hain !

Baat Woh Kab Ki Bhula Di Hum Nay !

Sheher-E-Jahan Rakh Say Abad Hua !

Aag Jab Dil Ki Bujha Di Hum Nay !

Aaj Phir Yaad Bohat Aaya Woh !

Aaj Phir Us Ko Dua Di Hum Nay !

Koi To Baat Hia Us Main Faiz~ !

Her Khushi Jis Pay Luta Di Hum Nay !

x............x............x

Kyun Hota Hain Har Bbaar Mere Sath Hi Aisa,
Jise Paoon Usse Khone Ka Darr Hota Hain Jyada,

Kyun Koi Nahi Aisa Jo Ho Sirf Mera,
Jo Hamesha Saath Dene Ka Kare Mujhse Waada

Jo Kabhi Chord Na Jaaye Mujhe,
Jo Samje Mujhe Khud Se Bhi Jyada,

Mujhe samje, Mujhe pehchane, Mujhse Hi Pyaar Kare,
Kya Koi Nahi Iss Jag Main Aisa???????????.

Jab Soo Jate Hai Sari Duniya..
Jab Soo Jate hai Sari Duniya,
Chupke Se Aakar Chaad,
Khada Ho Jata Hai,
Mere Khidki Ke Samne,
Aur Muskara Kar Kehata Hai,
Khooj Lo Muzmi Wo Chehara,
Jiske Talaash Mai Ho Tum,
   
Tandi HAWAAI Pass Aate Hai Mere,
Aur Kehate Hai,
Bahoot Udaas Ho Na,
Agale Baar Jab Lootuge,
Sapno Ke Desh Se,
Jaroor Lekar Aaooge,
Uska Pata,
   
BAADAL Kehate Hai,
Hum To Bhatakte Hai, Desh-Pardesh Mai,
Kabhi Chalna Hamare Saath,
Milkar Taalasege Tere CHAAD Ko,
   
Chaad,Sitare,Hawaai, Koyal,
Sab Kartee Hai Tumhare Bataiyan,
Mai Sunta Hu Chupchaap,
   
Aur Sabke Chale Jane Ke Baad,
Dheere Se Booltaa Hu Ek Baat,
Mai Jaanta Hu,
Tum Jaha ho,
Jaha Kahi Bhee Ho,
Zaroor Sunn Loge Ye Baat,

x

thanx

Angels
by B. H. Fairchild


Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college
one winter, hauling a load of Herefords
from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of
Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser
Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end
of his semi gliding around in the side mirror
as he hit ice and knew he would never live
to see graduation or the castle at Duino.


In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift
(the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he said
four flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings
spread so wide he couldn’t see, and then
the world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask
around. Little Bill and I sang Your Cheatin’
Heart and laughed, and then a sudden quiet
put a hard edge on the morning and we left.


Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive, he said,
leaping down the hospital steps. The nurses
waved, white dresses puffed out like pigeons
in the morning breeze. We roared off in my Dodge,
Behold, I come like a thief! he shouted to the town
and gave his life to poetry. He lives, now,
in the south of France. His poems arrive
by mail, and we read them and do not understand.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
by B. H. Fairchild


In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.


Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.


Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

Flight
by B. H. Fairchild

In the early stages of epilepsy there
occurs a characteristic dream .... One is
somehow lifted free of one’s own body;
looking back one sees oneself and feels a
sudden, maddening fear; another presence is
entering one’s own person, and there is no
avenue of return.
—George Steiner


Outside my window the wasps
are making their slow circle,
dizzy flights of forage and return,
hovering among azaleas
that bob in a sluggish breeze
this humid, sun-torn morning.


Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.


Last night dreams stormed my brain
in thick swirls of shame and fear.
Behind a white garage a locked shed
full of wide-eyed dolls burned,
yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps
as I watched, feet nailed to the ground.
In dining cars white table cloths
unfolded wings and flew like gulls.
An old German in a green Homburg
sang lieder, Mein Herz ist müde.
In a garden in Pasadena my father
posed in Navy whites while overhead
silver dirigibles moved like great whales.
And in the narrowing tunnel
of the dream’s end I flew down
onto the iron red road
of my grandfather’s farm.
There was a white rail fence.
In the green meadow beyond,
a small boy walked toward me.
His smile was the moon’s rim.
Across his egg-shell eyes
ran scenes from my future life,
and he embraced me like a son
or father or my lost brother.

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
by B. H. Fairchild


In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.


Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.


Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

In the House of the Latin Professor
by B. H. Fairchild


All things fall away: store fronts on the west,
ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded
and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR
to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers


and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers.
The diminishing neighborhood sprawls
under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm,
the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted.


Inside the cottage a bay window translates
the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque
trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled
as the house turns slowly beneath the drift


of tree branch and sun. We have come
to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets
over the fat reading chair and the piano’s
mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s


blur of black notes. Among a turmoil
of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid
open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom
we imagine a flourish of light, her husband


loosening the sash of her white silk robe,
his beard brushing the back of her neck.
Amores, the art of love, of words lifting
like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels


of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost
risen to music. We lock the heavy door
and walk away from the silence, the lone
hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house

Mrs. Hill
by B. H. Fairchild


I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.


Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown
as if she wants to choke herself. He said
he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun
and he said he was going to shoot me.


I have never heard of such a thing. A man
wanting to shoot his wife. His wife.
I am standing in the center of a room
barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman
is crying and being held and soothed
by my mother. Outside, through the open door
my father is holding a shotgun,
and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill,
who bows his head and sobs into his hands.


A line of shadows seems to he moving
across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers
on a death march, or kindly old ladies
in flower hats lugging grocery bags.


At Roman’s Salvage tire tubes
are hanging from trees, where we threw them.
In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there’s a sign:
WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW.
For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.
Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior
the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,
the library of Alexandria is burning.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City
the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII
is sitting in a Muriel cigar box,
and every V-Day someone named Schwartz
or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.


In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing
gin rummy with my mother and laughing
in those long shrieks that women have
that make you think they are dying.


I walk into the front yard where moonlight
drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftain.
I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves.
No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.

Old Men Playing Basketball
by B. H. Fairchild


The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,


rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone


and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love


to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing


to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,


radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,


gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

The Book of Hours
by B. H. Fairchild


Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons
hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled
and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment.
And here, she notes, the Procession of St. Gregory,
where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death
returns his bloody sword to its scabbard, and staring
down at the marble floor, liquid in the slanted
silver light of mid-morning, she ponders briefly
the polished faces of her audience: seraphim gazing
heavenward at the golden throne, or, as she raises
her tired eyes to meet their eyes, the evolving souls
of purgatory, bored as the inhabitants of some
fashionable European spa sunbathing on boulders.
And here, notice the lovely treatment of St. John
on Patmos, robed in blue and gold, and she tells the story
of gall-nuts, goats’ skins dried and stretched into vellum—
the word vellum delicious in its saying, caressed
in her mouth like a fat breakfast plum—lapis lazuli
crushed into pools of ultramarine blue, and gold foil
hammered thin enough to float upon the least breath,
the scribes hastily scraping gold flakes into ceramic cups,
curling their toes against the cold like her lover stepping
out of bed in that odd, delicate way of his, wisps of gold
drifting like miniature angels onto the scriptorium’s
stone floor, and dogs’ teeth to polish the gold leaf
as transcendent in its beauty, she says, as the medieval
mind conceived the soul to be.


                                                    The patrons are beginning
to wander now as she points to the crucifixion scene,
done to perfection by the Limbourg brothers, the skull and bones
of Adam lying scattered beneath the Roman soldier’s horse,
and the old custodian wipes palm prints from the glass, the monks
breathe upon their fingertips and pray against the hard winter,
and the art historian recalls the narrow shafts of light tapping
the breakfast table, the long curve of his back in half-shadow,
the bed’s rumpled sheets lifted by an ocean breeze
as if they were the weightless gold leaf of the spirit.

The Men
by B. H. Fairchild


As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl
booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,
you watch the late-afternoon drunks
coming and going, sunlight breaking
through the smoky dark as the door
opens and closes, and it’s the future
flashing ahead like the taillights
of a semi as you drop over a rise
in the road on your way to Amarillo,
bright lights and blonde-haired women,
as Billy used to say, slumped over
his beer like a snail, make a real man
out of you, the smile bleak as the gaps
between his teeth, stay loose, son,
don’t die before you’re dead. Always
the warnings from men you worked with
before they broke, blue fingernails,
eyes red as fate. A different life
for me, you think, and outside later,
feeling young and strong enough to raise
the sun back up, you stare down Highway 54,
pushing everything—stars, sky, moon,
all but a thin line at the edge
of the world—behind you. Your headlights
sweep across the tavern window,
ripping the dark from the small, humped
shapes of men inside who turn and look,
like small animals caught in the glare
of your lights on the road to Amarillo.

All This and More
by Mary Karr


The Devil’s tour of hell did not include
a factory line where molten lead
spilled into mouths held wide,


no electric drill spiraling screws
into hands and feet, nor giant pliers
to lower you into simmering vats.


Instead, a circle of light
opened on your stuffed armchair,
whose chintz orchids did not boil and change,


and the Devil adjusted
your new spiked antennae
almost delicately, with claws curled


and lacquered black, before he spread
his leather wings to leap
into the acid-green sky.


So your head became a tv hull,
a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger
sloppy at the mouth


and swollen at the joints
enacted your days in sinuous
slow motion, your lines delivered


with a mocking sneer. Sometimes
the frame froze, reversed, began
again: the red eyes of a friend


you cursed, your girl child cowered
behind the drapes, parents alive again
and puzzled by this new form. That’s why


you clawed your way back to this life.

County Fair
by Mary Karr


On the mudroad of plodding American bodies,
        my son wove like an antelope from stall
to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up
        killer robot and winged alien; knives
hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf
        bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff.
Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke,
        I got in line. A hog carcass,
blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll,
        a metaphor, I thought, for anyone
ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed
        for the titanium blade I’d just seen
curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting
        in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh.
Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn
        for the body politic
weren’t some outward form of inner scorn,
        as if I were fit judge.
Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped
        only to stand tall enough
to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown
        and sparks skittered overhead
in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some
        newly powered monster.
Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on,
        the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt
and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces
        all broke smiles, in fact,
till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute
        became itself an interruption. One face
after another wheeled shining at me from the dark,
        each bearing the weight of a whole self.
What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls
        shut up their nasty talk.
We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos,
        a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting.
My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine.
        My chest was all thunder.
On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver
        chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia,
then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son
        jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep
the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more
        than what we had. The road
rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day.
        Inside my hand’s flesh,
anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.

BAZM-E-YAARAAN



Manoos Kar Chkuey Hein Ye Diwar-o-Dar Mujhey

Zindaan Ke Baad Raas Na Ayega Ghar Muhjey



Umeed-e-Zindagi Nahee Aye Charah-Gar Mujhey

Shaam Hogayee Tou Phir Na Hogi Sehar Mujhey



Mein Ek Mata'a-e-Eshq Houn, Khhoya Agar Mujhey

Shayed Na Pa Sakoge Kaheen Umar Bhar Mujhey



Kiya Jeetay Ji Umeed-e-Rahayee Se Wasta

Dhoka Na Dein Qafas Mein Merey Baal-o-Par Mujhey ></SCRIPT>



Dou Jan-ba-Lab Mareez Hein, Ek Marg-e-Muntazir

Mein Uss Ko Dekhhta Houn Charagh-e-Sehar Mujhey



Tang Aake Chordta Houn Dunya Ko Aap He

Duyna Ghareeb Chord Ke Jaati Kidhar Mujhey



Aayena Ban Raha Houn Kisi Ke Jamal Ka

Kuch Sochtey Hein Dekh Ke Ahl-e-Nazar Mujhey



Ma'adoom Ho Chuka Ye Ehsaa-e-Zindagi

Chahein Tou Zehar De Dein Merey Charah-Gar Mujhey



Jeeney Ki Hey Salaah, Ke Marney Ki Eshq Mein

Dil Se Ye Poochna Hey Kahein Baythh Kar Mujhey

CLEAVE THOU THE WAVES.

CLEAVE thou the waves that weltering to and fro
Surge multitudinous. The eternal Powers
Of sun, moon, stars, the air, the hurrying hours,
The winged winds, the still dissolving show
Of clouds in calm or storm, for ever flow
Above thee; while the abysmal sea devours
The untold dead insatiate, where it lowers
O'er glooms unfathomed, limitless, below.


No longer on the golden-fretted sands,
Where many a shallow tide abortive chafes,
Mayst thou delay; life onward sweeping blends
With far-off heaven: the dauntless one who braves
The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands,
The elements sustain: cleave thou the waves.

HOPE.

ALL treasures of the earth and opulent seas,
Metals and odorous woods and cunning gold,
Fowls of the air and furry beasts untold,
Vineyards and harvest fields and fruitful trees
Nature gave unto Man; and last her keys
Vouched passage to her secret ways of old
Whence knowledge should be wrung, nay power to mould
Out of the rough, his occult destinies.


But tired of these he craved a wider scope:
Then fair as Pallas from the brain of Jove
From his deep wish there sprang, full-armed, to cope
With all life's ills, even very death in love,
The only thing man never wearies of--
His own creation--visionary Hope.

THE DEAD.

THE dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
Our perishable bodies are the mould
In which their strong imperishable will--
Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil--
Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.


Vibrations infinite of life in death,
As a star's travelling light survives its star!
So may we hold our lives, that when we are
The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
They shall not drag us to their judgment bar,
And curse the heritage which we bequeath

TIME'S SHADOW.

THY life, O Man, in this brief moment lies:
    Time's narrow bridge whereon we darkling stand,
    With an infinitude on either hand
Receding luminously from our eyes.
Lo, there thy Past's forsaken Paradise
    Subsideth like some visionary strand,
    While glimmering faint, the Future's promised land,
Illusive from the abyss, seems fain to rise.


This hour alone Hope's broken pledges mar,
    And joy now gleams before, now in our rear,
Like mirage mocking in some waste afar,
    Dissolving into air as we draw near.
    Beyond our steps the path is sunny-clear,
The shadow lying only where we are

SYMBOL.

HURRYING for ever in their restless flight
    The generations of earth's teeming womb
    Rise into being and lapse into the tomb
Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light;
They sink in quick succession out of sight
    Into the thick insuperable gloom
    Our futile lives in flashing by illume--
Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night.


Nay--but consider, though we change and die,
    If men must pass shall Man not still remain?
    As the unnumbered drops of summer rain
Whose changing particles unchanged on high,
    Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain
The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky.

SUFFERING.

OH ye, all ye, who suffer here below,
Schooled in the baffling mystery of pain,
Who on life's anvil bear the fateful strain,
Wrong as forged iron, hammered blow on blow.
Take counsel with your grief, in that you know,
That he who suffers suffers not in vain,
Nay, that it shall be for the whole world's gain,
And wisdom prove the priceless price of woe.


Thus in some new-found land where no man's feet
Have trod a path, bold voyagers astray,
May fall foredone by torturing thirst and heat:
But from the impotent body of defeat--
The winners spring who carve a conquering way--
Measured by milestones of their perished clay.

ANALKH.

LIKE a great rock which looming o'er the deep
Casts his eternal shadow on the strands,
And veiled in cloud inexorably stands,
While vaulting round his adamantine steep
Embattled breakers clamorously leap,
Sun-garlanded and hope-uplifted bands,
But soon with waters shattered in the sands
Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:


So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate!
For still our eager hearts exultant beat,
Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate,
And dashing break against thy marble feet.
But would Hope's rainbow-aureole round us fleet,
Without these hurtling shocks of man's estate?

SLEEP.

LOVE-CRADLING Night, lit by the lucent moon,
Most pitiful and mother-hearted Night!
Blest armistice in life's tumultuous fight,
Resolving discords to a spheral tune!
When tired with heat and strenuous toil of noon,
With ceaseless conflict betwixt might and right,
With ebb and flow of sorrow and delight,
Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon:


To thee, O star-eyes comforter, we creep,
Earth's ill-used step-children to thee make moan,
As hiding in thy dark skirts' ample sweep;
--Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own;
For dunned by Death, to whom we owe its loan,
Give us, O Night, the interest paid in sleep.

DEAD LOVE.

MOTHER of the unfortunate, mystic form,
Who calm, immutable, like oldest fate,
Sittest, where through the sombre swinging gate
Moans immemorial life's encircling storm.
My heart, sore stricken by grief's leaden arm,
Lags like a weary pilgrim knocking late,
And sigheth--toward thee staggering with its weight--
Behold Love conquered by thy son, the worm!


He stung him mid the roses' purple bloom,
The Rose of roses, yea, a thing so sweet,
Haply to stay blind Change's flying feet,
And stir with pity the unpitying tomb.
Here, take him, cold, cold, heavy and void of breath!
Nor me refuse, O Mother almighty, death.

DESPAIR.

THY wings swoop darkening round my soul, Despair!
And on my brain thy shadow seems to brood
And hem me round with stifling solitude,
With chasms of vacuous bloom which are thy lair.
No light of human joy, no song or prayer,
Breaks ever on this chaos, all imbrued
With heart's-blood trickling from the multitude
Of sweet hopes slain, or agonising there.


Lo, wilt thou yield thyself to grief, and roll
Vanquished from thy high seat, imperial brain,
And abdicating turbulent life's control,
Be dragged a captive bound in sorrow's chain?
Nay! though my heart is breaking with its pain,
No pain on earth has power to crush my soul.

TO MEMORY.

OH in this dearth and winter of the soul,
When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall--
Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
One leaf, one blossom from that far-off spring
When love's auroral light lay over all.


Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill
Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years
May, like the gusty south, breathe o'er the chill
Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears,
Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain,
Will deem, perchance, Love's springtide come again.

SAVING LOVE.

WOULD we but love what will not pass away!
    The sun that on each morning shines as clear
    As when it rose first on the world's first year;
The fresh green leaves that rustle on the spray.
The sun will shine, the leaves will be as gay
    When graves are full of all our hearts held dear,
    When not a soul of those who loved us here,
Not one, is left us--creatures of decay.


Yea, love the Abiding in the Universe
Which was before, and will be after us.
    Nor yet for ever hanker and vainly cry
    For human love--the beings that change or die;
Die--change--forget: to care so is a curse,
Yet cursed we'll be rather than not care thus.

HAUNTED STREETS.

LO, haply walking in some clattering street--
Where throngs of men and women dumbly pass,
Like shifting pictures seen within a glass
Which leave no trace behind--one seems to meet,
In roads once trodden by our mutual feet,
A face projected from that shadowy mass
Of faces, quite familiar as it was,
Which beaming on us stands out clear and sweet.


The face of faces we again behold
That lit our life when life was very fair,
And leaps our heart toward eyes and mouth and hair:
Oblivious of the undying love grown cold,
Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould,
We stretch out yearning hands and grasp--the air