Five Cinquains / Adelaide Crapsey

       
November Night

Listen . . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.


Susanna and the Elders

"Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?" "For that
She is beautiful, delicate.
Therefore."


Triad

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow . . . the hour
Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
Just dead.


Niagara
(Seen on Night in November)

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.


The Warning

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?

---
Adelaide Crapsey
from Verse, 1915

[Poems are in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Adelaide Crapsey biography