Sick and used Cambridge in the suck- Ing sound of slow rain at dead dawn
Slipped down, the slicking sound cars make
As if continually thin cloth were torn,
Blue light, plum light, fading violet light,
And then the oyster light of the wool sky:
Is this not, after all, appropriate
Light for a long used poet such as I?
The steady juices of the rain fulfill
November, ember, ashen ageing youth:
Here, my dear poet, with weather, wit, and will,
And a long look you learned to like the truth!
~~ Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) from Commentary,March 1950 [Poem is in the public domain in Canada]
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
~~ Charles Sorley (1895-1915) from Marlborough, and other poems, 1916 [Poem is in the public domain worldwide]
Breath wears clothes where faces shine
As dream clothes ache for light,
To give heart-people illumined shrines
That alabaster breaks.
A mother brings her offspring into town,
folded arm in arm,
She wears a serape dress of years
To walk among the crowds.
I hollow out a crawlspace in the attic floor
to keep this resolution strong,
to bear in mind the refuge and the breath,
word of mouth to those who flee the wars.
~~
AE Reiff, 2026
[All rights reserved by the author - used with permission]
Lit candle in attic crawlspace. (Image generated with AI).
“They made her a grave, too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe.
“And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be, And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near.”
Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds — His path was rugged and sore,
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man never trod before.
And when on the earth he sunk to sleep, If slumber his eyelids knew,
He lay, where the deadly vine doth weep Its venomous tear and nightly steep The flesh with blistering dew!
And near him the she-wolf stirr’d the brake, And the copper-snake breath’d in his ear,
Till he starting cried, from his dream awake, “Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake, And the white canoe of my dear?”
He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright Quick over its surface play’d —
“Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!” And the dim shore echoed for many a night The name of the death-cold maid.
Till he hollow’d a boat of the birchen bark, Which carried him off from shore;
Far, far he follow’d the meteor spark, The wind was high and the clouds were dark, And the boat return’d no more.
But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp, This lover and maid so true
Are seen at the hour of midnight damp
To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp, And paddle their white canoe!
~~ Thomas Moore (1779-1852), 1803 fromEpistles, Odes, and other poems, 1806 [Poem is in the public domain worldwide]
