The Fire
The old men of the world have made a fire
To warm their trembling hands.
They poke the young men in.
The young men burn like withes.
If one run a little way,
The old men are wrath.
They catch him and bind him and throw him again to the flames.
Green withes burn slow…
And the smoke of the young men's torment
Rises round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak,
And the darkness thereof spreads over the sky….
Green withes burn slow…
And the old men of the world sit round the fire
And rub their hands….
But the smoke of the young men's torment
Ascends up for ever and ever.
poem by Lola Ridge
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The Foundling
Snow wraiths circle us
Like washers of the dead,
Flapping their white wet cloths
Impatiently
About the grizzled head,
Where the coarse hair mats like grass,
And the efficient wind
With cold professional baste
Probes like a lancet
Through the cotton shirt…
About us are white cliffs and space.
No façades show,
Nor roof nor any spire…
All sheathed in snow…
The parasitic snow
That clings about them like a blight.
Only detached lights
Float hazily like greenish moons,
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poem by Lola Ridge
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Windows
TIME-STONE
Hallo, Metropolitan—
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
This midnight the moon,
Playing virgin after all her encounters,
Will break another date with you.
You fuss an awful lot,
You flight of ledger books,
Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
Dancing on spindle legs
An interminable can-can.
But I'd rather… like the cats in the alley… count time
By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
Than all your tally of the sunsets,
Metropolitan, ticking among stars.
poem by Lola Ridge
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Dedication
I would be a torch unto your hand,
A lamp upon your forehead, Labor,
In the wild darkness before the Dawn
That I shall never see…
We shall advance together, my Beloved,
Awaiting the mighty ushering…
Together we shall make the last grand charge
And ride with gorgeous Death
With all her spangles on
And cymbals clashing…
And you shall rush on exultant as I fall -
Scattering a brief fire about your feet…
Let it be so…
Better - while life is quick
And every pain immense and joy supreme,
And all I have and am
Flames upward to the dream…
Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,
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poem by Lola Ridge
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Dispossessed
Tender and tremulous green of leaves
Turned up by the wind,
Twanging among the vines -
Wind in the grass
Blowing a clear path
For the new-stripped soul to pass…
The naked soul in the sunlight…
Like a wisp of smoke in the sunlight
On the hill-side shimmering.
Dance light on the wind, little soul,
Like a thistle-down floating
Over the butterflies
And the lumbering bees…
Come away from that tree
And its shadow grey as a stone…
Bathe in the pools of light
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poem by Lola Ridge
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The Song
That day, in the slipping of torsos and straining flanks
on the bloodied ooze of fields plowed by the iron,
And the smoke bluish near earth and bronze in the sunshine
floating like cotton-down,
And the harsh and terrible screaming,
And that strange vibration at the roots of us…
Desire, fierce, like a song…
And we heard
(Do you remember?)
All the Red Cross bands on Fifth avenue
And bugles in little home towns
And children's harmonicas bleating
America!
And after…
(Do you remember?)
The drollery of the wind on our faces,
And horizons reeling,
And the terror of the plain
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poem by Lola Ridge
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Promenade
Undulant rustlings,
Of oncoming silk,
Rhythmic, incessant,
Like the motion of leaves…
Fragments of color
In glowing surprises…
Pink inuendoes
Hooded in gray
Like buds in a cobweb
Pearled at dawn…
Glimpses of green
And blurs of gold
And delicate mauves
That snatch at youth…
And bodies all rosily
Fleshed for the airing,
In warm velvety surges
Passing imperious, slow…
Women drift into the limousines
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poem by Lola Ridge
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Under-Song
There is music in the strong
Deep-throated bush,
Whisperings of song
Heard in the leaves' hush -
Ballads of the trees
In tongues unknown -
A reminiscent tone
On minor keys…
Boughs swaying to and fro
Though no winds pass…
Faint odors in the grass
Where no flowers grow,
And flutterings of wings
And faint first notes,
Once babbled on the boughs
Of faded springs.
Is it music from the graves
Of all things fair
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poem by Lola Ridge
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The Garden
Bountiful Givers,
I look along the years
And see the flowers you threw…
Anemones
And sprigs of gray
Sparse heather of the rocks,
Or a wild violet
Or daisy of a daisied field…
But each your best.
I might have worn them on my breast
To wilt in the long day…
I might have stemmed them in a narrow vase
And watched each petal sallowing…
I might have held them so - mechanically -
Till the wind winnowed all the leaves
And left upon my hands
A little smear of dust.
Instead
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poem by Lola Ridge
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Jaguar
Nasal intonations of light
and clicking tongues…
publicity of windows
stoning me with pent-up cries…
smells of abattoirs…
smells of long-dead meat.
Some day-end—
while the sand is yet cozy as a blanket
off the warm body of a squaw,
and the jaguars are out to kill…
with a blue-black night coming on
and a painted cloud
stalking the first star—
I shall go alone into the Silence…
the coiled Silence…
where a cry can run only a little way
and waver and dwindle
and be lost.
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poem by Lola Ridge
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