The train is a dragon that roars through the dark.
He wriggles his tail as he sends up a spark. He pierces the night with his one yellow eye,
And all the earth trembles when he rushes by.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, lulled in these flowers with dances and delight...
It's the fall,
the unfallen apples hold their brightness a little longer into the blue air,
Hold the dream they can be brighter.
With soft crimson fingers, the apple hangs like a spark
grasping the magic wand of a tree's branch.
She is suspended by the promise that is Autumn.
The cat went here and there and the moon spun 'round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
My feet took a walk in the heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in the heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Last night when the yellow moon of November broke through the last line of turbulent Midwestern clouds,
a lone frog,
the same one who probably announced the spring floods,
attempted to sing.
Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.
A little green kite, loose in the wind's hand.
The leaf spins and tumbles like an acrobat,
settling at my feet.
Snow is a mind falling,
a continuous breath of climbs, loops, spirals, dips into the earth
like white fireflies wanting to land,
finding a wind between houses, diving like moths into their own light
so that one wonders if snow is a wing's long memory across winter.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should;
but made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do.
I've watched you now a full half-hour
Self-poised upon that yellow flower;
And, little butterfly, indeed, I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless!
-- Not frozen seas more motionless;
and then, What joy awaits you when the breeze hath found you out among the trees,
and calls you forth again!
I love to see the big white moon, A-shining in the sky;
I love to see the little stars, when shadow clouds go by.
I love the rain drops falling on my rooftop in the night;
I love the soft wind's sighing, Before the dawn's gray light.
