0114
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Delicate omens traced on air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undecieving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or corier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay
For the prevision is allied
Until the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
Vulture
William Carlos Williams
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a
bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a
vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer,
its orbit narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and
heard the flight feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come
nearer…
. . . how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked,
veering away in the sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be
eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and
those eyes –
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an ensky-
ment; what a life after death.
To a Waterfowl
William Cullen Briant
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight, to do thee wrong,
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chaféd ocean side?
There is a Power, whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost.
All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere;
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.
And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.
Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must trace alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
From Across the Bay
Robert Wallace
Egrets, icy on storm-ink blue
that darkens lightly every instant,
thread homeward, flapping, in straggling lines,
in bunches, They are as startling white
as the waves the wind lips on the bay’s
black-green toward us, their great wings leafing
air as they come long-leggedly dropping
into the pale salt marsh’s tufty
windrow cedars, to sit like candles
on the storm’s limbs, white, wing-fluttered.
The rain when it comes will drench them,
the dark pinch them out, as it batters
and wrestles runneling at our windows.
Clearings hacked by lighting will show
them– wet, white half seconds. – still there:
asleep, waiting, a kind of certainty.
Fine Poems, Fine Art 