Comrades

Life
You have been good to me….
You have not made yourself too dear
to juggle with.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Brooklyn Bridge

Pythoness body—arching
Over the night like an ecstasy—
I feel your coils tightening…
And the world’s lessening breath.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

The Star

Last night
I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea,
Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star,
Containing both as in a trembling cup.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Babel

Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel -
Not mere tongues dividing, but soul from soul,
So that never again should men be able
To fashion one infinite, towering whole.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Electricity

Out of fiery contacts…
Rushing auras of steel
Touching and whirled apart…
Out of the charged phallases
Of iron leaping
Female and male,
Complete, indivisible, one,
Fused into light.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Palestine

Old plant of Asia -
Mutilated vine
Holding earth's leaping sap
In every stem and shoot
That lopped off, sprouts again -
Why should you seek a plateau walled about,
Whose garden is the world?

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Spires

Spires of Grace Church,
For you the workers of the world
Travailed with the mountains…
Aborting their own dreams
Till the dream of you arose -
Beautiful, swaddled in stone -
Scorning their hands.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

An Old Workman

Warped… gland-dry…
With spine askew
And body shrunken into half its space…
Well-used as some cracked paving-stone…
Bearing on his grimed and pitted front
A stamp… as of innumerable feet.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Debris

I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls -
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodged an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Emma Goldman

How should they appraise you, who walk up close to you as to a mountain, each proclaiming his own eyeful against the other's eyeful.

Only time standing well off shall measure your circumference and height.

poem by Lola Ridge
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!