Those we love truly never die,
Though year by year the sad memorial wreath,
A ring and flowers, types of life and death,
Are laid upon their graves.

For death the pure life saves,
And life all pure is love; and love can reach
From heaven to earth, and nobler lessons teach
Than those by mortals read.

Well blest is he who has a dear one dead:
A friend he has whose face will never change—
A dear communion that will not grow strange;
The anchor of a love is death.

The blessed sweetness of a loving breath

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk;
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust;
And loved so well a high behavior
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?—
O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

A still procession goes
Amid the battle's booming,
Its arm the red cross shows;
It prays in many forms of speech,
And, bending o'er the fallen,
Brings peace and home to each.

Not only is it found
Where bleed the wounds of battle,
But all the world around.
It is the love the whole world feels
In noble hearts and tender,
While gentle pity kneels;-

It is all labor's dread
Of war's mad waste and murder,
Praying that peace may spread;
It is all sufferers who heed
The sighing of a brother,

IN MEMORY OF A SON OF ARCHDEACON FARRAR

AFAR he sleeps whose name is graven here,
Where loving hearts his early doom deplore;
Youth, promise, virtue, all that made him dear
Heaven lent, earth borrowed, sorrowing to restore.

With all its best of sense and wit
Each Album's earlier leaves are writ;
No page—but Love and Friendship on it
Shower dainty prose and perfumed sonnet;
While not one troubling thought comes nigh
Of future dearth and vacancy.

Yet blight, e'en now, is on the wing
To nip that vernal blossoming;
His tribute flowers Wit fails to yield,
Sense, worldly grown, seeks wider field;
E'en Love and Friendship cease to write,
And half the book is idle white.

Turn, Emblem-seeker, turn and look,
Thou'lt find a moral in the book.

Such love as some of the dead queens have had
Whose sorrow matched their beauty. I could bear it,
And I think die too, to have been so glad.
With the sweet wonder in a great light lying
I would not e'en upbraid the deadly dart,
But gazing in the eyes of my Love, dying,
Passion my beauty in his aching heart.
Beyond the shadow of my own renewal
So to have set my beauty like a flame,
Quivering as Helen's — ah! that Trojan jewel,
Where all love's pride and sorrow has a name —
I, too, would take time's grandeur to the dust,

for Bobbie


Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all


that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.

If the moon did not ...
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not

do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad

For her hennaed naib I'll give,
pot-fuls of blood from under my throat,
that tall beloved of mine,
is attired in robes of scent Rasul.
Mir is crying his heart, away,
far in Dooru, oh love

This is for every woman
that cries herself to sleep
that lies alone in bed at night
that stays awake, unable to sleep

This is for every woman
that is scared of being hurt again
that has been left behind, heartbroken
that needs to be given something to believe in

This is for every woman
that needs to feel wanted
that wants to feel desirable
that feels like no one even cares

This is for every woman
that has loved another freely
that shows how much she cares
that accepts others for who they are