The Guarded Wound

If it

were lighter touch

Than petal of flower resting

On grass oh still too heavy it were,

Too heavy!

-Adelaide Crapsey Footnote1

Traid

These be

Three silent things:

The falling snow.. the hour

Before the dawn.. the mouth of one

Just dead.

-Adelaide Crapsey Footnote2

Trapped

Well and

If day on day

Follows, and weary year

On year.. and ever days and years..

Well?

-Adelaide Crapsey Footnote3

Sunburst

of irised spray,

you tremble on that roar

of folded and fluted water,

tumbling

-Ruby Shackleford Footnote4

Oread

Whirl up, sea -

whirl your pointed pines,

splash your great pines

on our rocks,

hurl your green over us

cover us with your pools of fir.

-Harriet Doolittle Footnote5

NUANCE

Even the iris bends

When a butterfly lights upon it.

-Amy Lowell Footnote6

Autumn Haze

Is it a dragon fly or maple leaf

That settles softly down upon the water?

-Amy Lowell Footnote7

VI

This then is morning.

Have you no comfort for me

Cold-coloured flowers?

-Amy Lowell Footnote8

XVI

Last night it rained.

Now, in the desolate dawn,

Crying of bluejays.

-Amy Lowell Footnote9

XXI

Turning from the page,

Blind with a night of labour,

I hear morning crows.

-Amy Lowell Footnote10

Proportion

In the sky there is a moon and stars,

And in my garden there are yellow moths

Fluttering about a white azalea bush

-Amy Lowell Footnote11

Carrefour

O you,

Who came upon me once

Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing

Why did you not strangle me before speaking

Rather than fill me with the wil white honey of your words

And then leave me to the mercy

Of the forest bees?

- -Amy Lowell Footnote12

Wind and Silver

Greatly shining,

The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;

And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon scales

As she passes over them.

-Amy Lowell Footnote13

The Fisherman's Wife

When I am alone,

The wind in the pine-trees

Is like the shuffling of waves

Upon the wooden sides of a boat.

-Amy Lowell Footnote14

The images of haiku in Sophie Giauque's work were described by Rainer Rilke in a letter as: "...the haiku, the art as it were of making 'a pill, its disparate elements combined by the event and by the emotion it excites, but subject always to the total taken with a sure hand, picked like a ripe fruit, but weightless, for once set down it is compelled to convey the invisible'." 15

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch,

Lust Niemandes Schlaf zu sein

unter soviel Lidern

-Rainer Rilke12

Rose, oh pure contridiction

Desire of no one's sleep to be

under so many eyelids

(-trans. Leishman)13

Words written by Rainer Marie Rilke for the headstone on his grave in the churchyard cemetery of Rarogne, France.

================

Footnote1

. Adelaide Crapsey, Verse ..., op. cit., pp. 73.

Footnote2

. Ibid., pp. 70.

Footnote3

. Ibid., pp. 71.

Footnote4

. Ruby Shackleford, Rosewood, Self-published, 1987.

Footnote5

. Harriet Doolittle, H.D. Collected Poems 1912-1944, Louis L. Martz, New Directions, 1983.

Footnote6

. Amy Lowell, Pictures of the Floating World, Macmillan Co., 1919.

Footnote7

. Ibid.

Footnote8

. Amy Lowell, What's O'Clock, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925.

Footnote9

. Ibid.

Footnote10

10. Ibid.

Footnote11

11. Amy Lowell. A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now. Edited by Aliki Barnstone & Willis Barnstone. New York, New York: Schocken Books, 1980.

Footnote12

12. Ibid., pp. 475.

Footnote13

13. Ibid., pp. 476.

Footnote14

14. Ibid., pp. 476.

15. Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, Claredon Press, 1986. pp.385

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