Words That Burn

The Homecoming, by Anna Wickham (1884-1947)

I waited ten years in the husk

That once had been our home,

Watching from dawn to dusk

To see if he would come.

And there he was beside me

Always at board and bed;

I looked — and woe betide me

He I had loved was dead.

He fell at night on the hillside,

They brought him home to his place,

I had not the solace of sorrow

Till I had looked at his face.

Then I clasped the broken body

To see if it breathed or moved,

For there, in the smile of his dying,

Was the gallant man I had loved.

O wives come lend me your weeping,

I have not enough of tears,

For he is dead who was sleping

These ten accursed years.

To the Sun, by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)

(Trans. by Michael Hamburger)

For a Five-Year-Old, by Fleur Adcock (1934-)

A snail is climbing up the window-sill

Into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain

That it would be unkind to leave it there:

It might crawl to the floor; we must take care

That no one squashes it.  You understand,

And carry it outside, wiht careful hand,

To eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

Your gentleness is moulded still by words

From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

Your closest relatives, and who purveyed

The harshest kind of truth to many another.

But this is how things are: I am your mother,

And we are kind to snails.

Something Like a Rainbow, by Christopher Benfey (1954-)

The storms that make it into poems most often

leave something like disaster in their wake:

the wine-glass elms in pieces on the lawn,

the chimney cracked, the basement a shallow lake.

This morning’s storm was nothing much by contrast —

a shiver of wind, no more than a minute’s rain.

Time enough to close the windows fast

in time to have to yake them wide again.

And yet it was as though the world had slept,

or I had, waking now to find out how

a storm will sometimes leave a golden frame

in which there’s room for something like a rainbow

to fan its shifting colors into flame —

a promise rashly made and richly kept.

Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth, by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)

The New Experience, by Suzanne Buffam (1972-)

Field, by Martha Collins (1940-)

The window fell out the window
and having only a frame
to refer to, we entered

a new field, the space filled
with lightness, wheat field, sweet
field, field of vision, field

and ground, and the puzzle became
the principle, a page without
a single tree, but you kept coming

back to the place, your fingers
reading my skin, and I cried Love!
before I could stop myself, love

is a yellow shirt, light
is what it thinks when it thinks
of itself, and now it shines

through both our skins, in
the field, out of the field,
two in the field where none

had been, field to field
with particles stirred
into being where we touch.

Desire, by Gail Mazur (1937-)

It was a kind of torture—waiting
to be kissed. A dark car parked away
from the street lamp, away from our house
where my tall father would wait, his face
visible at a pane high in the front door.
Was my mother always asleep? A boy
reached for me, I leaned eagerly into him,
soon the windshield was steaming.

Midnight. A neighbor’s bedroom light
goes on, then off. The street is quiet…

Until I married, I didn’t have my own key,
that wasn’t how it worked, not at our house.
You had to wake someone with the bell,
or he was there, waiting. Someone let you in.
Those pleasures on the front seat of a boy’s
father’s car were “guilty,” yet my body knew
they were the only right thing to do,

my body hated the cage it had become.

One of those boys died in a car crash;
one is a mechanic; one’s a musician.
They were young and soft, and, mostly, dumb.
I loved their lips, their eyebrows, the bones
of their cheeks, cheeks that scraped mine raw,
so I’d turn away from the parent who let me
angrily in. And always, the next day,

no one at home could penetrate the fog
around me. I’d relive the precious night
as if it were a bridge to my new state
from the old world I’d been imprisoned by,
and I’ve been allowed to walk on it, to cross
a border—there’s an invisible line
in the middle of the bridge, in the fog,
where I’m released, where I think I’m free.

Representation, by Rosmarie Waldrop (1935-)

Under the Linden Branches, by John Freeman (1880-1929)

Under the linden branches
They sit and whisper;
Hardly a quiver
Of leaves, hardly a lisp or
Sigh in the air.
Under the linden branches
They sit, and shiver
At the slow air’s fingers
Drawn through the linden branches
Where the year’s sweet lingers;
And sudden avalanches
Of memories, fears,
Shake from the linden branches
Upon them sitting
With hardly a sigh or a whisper
Or quiver of tears.