Sara Teasdale: "May Day"

  

A delicate fabric of bird song

   Floats in the air,

The smell of wet wild earth

   Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple

   Are clenched like a hand,

Like girls at their first communion
   The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by

   Without loving it much,

The raindrop try with my lips,

   The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure

   I shall see again

The world on the first of May

   Shining after the rain?

"May Day" by Sara Teasdale. Text as published in The Collected Poems (Digireads, 2012).

Art credit: "Ladybug after the Rain," photograph by jens kolk. 

Sara Teasdale: "Morning"

                                      I went out on an April morning
                                          All alone, for my heart was high,
                                      I was a child of the shining meadow,
                                          I was a sister of the sky.

                                      There in the windy flood of morning
                                          Longing lifted its weight from me,
                                      Lost as a sob in the midst of cheering,
                                          Swept as a sea-bird out to sea.

"Morning" by Sara Teasdale, from The Collected Poems. © Digireads.com Publishing, 1951.

Image credit: "Windy Morning," Po Mo painting by Virginia Lloyd-Davies (originally color).

Sara Teasdale: "September Midnight"

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
       Ceaseless, insistent.  

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
       Tired with summer.  

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
       Snow-hushed and heavy.  

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
       Lest they forget them.

"September Midnight," by Sara Teasdale. Published in Poetry, March 1914.

Photography credit: Untitled, by Zachary Koontz (originally color).