The City is Peopled
The city is peopled
with spirits, not ghosts, O my love:
Though they crowded between
and usurped the kiss of my mouth
their breath was your gift,
their beauty, your life.
This poem is in the public domain.
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The light beats upon me.
I am startled—
a split leaf crackles on the paved floor—
I am anguished—defeated.
A slight wind shakes the seed-pods—
my thoughts are spent
as the black seeds.
My thoughts tear me,
I dread their fever.
I am scattered in its whirl.
I am scattered like
the hot shrivelled seeds.
2016
O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air— fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat— plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.
1982
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
1982