Trees to the very water's edge—
Pond lilies white and full.
Bulrush & quaking grass and sedge
Where the moor hen clucks, does this seem to you
Anything more than an hour or two
Of hot, uneasy pull—?
A waste of mud where the sea scum floats
Forgotten of the tide,
Gully and gut, and stranded boats
Stretched like carcasses—What do you see
Just the mud & eternity
And nothing else beside
The wind-in the bents the hiss of the sand
Driven along the shore
The sweep of flat alluvial land
In a dozen lines of brown & gray.
How does it strike you—What do you say
Landscape and nothing more?
A sloping street with a railway arch
Spanning the end of it
A grey-stone chapel-prim and starch
Set in its own half acre of green
Railed like a jail and below-half seen
Red blurs from the lamps just lit
The stillness of dawn-the broad red glow
Breaking behind the pines
The mist in the valley and far below
A white smoke puff as the first train flies
Into the open, where serpentwise
The river curves and shines
Gravel foundation pits half done
Gaping and deep and dry
Unfinished houses-one by one
Standing guard over open cellars
To catch unwary inebriate dwellers
In the thick packed houses by.
A voice in the street, some sound unheeded
By others, a woman's gait
(But that no two women could walk as she did}
And you drift thro' the past on a broken ship
Derelict ten years-Give me the slip
While I stand on the shore & wait—
Choose another poem