Autumn
Sun smudge on
the smoky water
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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De Votre Bonheur Il Ne Reste Que Vos Photos Sipsce…
And the rain since
And I have not heard
Leaf at the pane all winter
Nor a bird's wing beating as that was
I have not seen
All year your leaning face again
Since I have never wakened but that smell
Of wet pine bark was in the room.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Liberty
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.
When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Voyage
for Ernest Hemingway
HEAP we these coppered hulls
With headed poppies
And garlic longed-for by the eager dead
Keep we with sun-caught sails
The westward ocean
Raise we that island on the sea at last
Steep to the gull-less shore
Across the sea rush
Trade we our cargoes with the dead for sleep.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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An Eternity
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.
Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever
Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after generation
Turn with reverence to the page?
Birdseye scholar of the frozen fish,
What would he make of the sole, clean, clear
Leap of the salmon that has disappeared?
To be, yes!--whether they like it or not!
But not to last when leap and water are forgotten,
A plank of standard pinkness in the dish.
They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Way-Station
The incoherent rushing of the train
Dulls like a drugged pain
Numbs
To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums
Unfolds
Hush within hush until the night withholds
Only its darkness.
From the deep
Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep
Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue.
Among
The sleeping listeners a sound
As leaves stir faintly on the ground
[...] Read more
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Broken Promise
THAT was by the door
Leafy evening in the apple trees
And you would not forget this anymore
And even if you died there would be these
Touchings remembered
and you would return
From any bourne from any shore
To find the evening in these leaves
To find my arms beside this door...
I think O my not now Ophelia
There are not always (like a moon)
Rememberings afterward
(I think there are
Sometimes a few strange stars upon the sky.)
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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The Old Men In The Leaf Smoke
The old men rake the yards for winter
Burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.
Raking the leaves, raking the lives,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves
But which is which they wonder &mdash whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves &mdash
Anyone left, that is, who lives.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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The Silent Slain
We too, we too, descending once again
The hills of our own land, we too have heard
Far off -- Ah, que ce cor a longue haleine --
The horn of Roland in the passages of Spain,
the first, the second blast, the failing third,
And with the third turned back and climbed once more
The steep road southward, and heard faint the sound
Of swords, of horses, the disastrous war,
And crossed the dark defile at last, and found
At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain
The dead against the dead and on the silent ground
The silent slain --
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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