Mulier flmicta Sole

Woman supremely blest 
In woman's prime desire 
To be most richly dressed:
Incomparable attire,
Blindingly irridescent
In robe of cloth-of-sun,
With Pleiad-plaited coronet, 
And slippered with the crescent! 
Gown sun-spun,
Crown star-set,
And the moon
For her shoon!
Woman supremely fit
To be so clothed, the one
Found truest, best, immaculate!
—Fray Angelico Chavez

Maine Valley

This is the valley where tall elm trees arch 
Like seraphs fallen asleep upon the march, 
They touch their wing-tips over barns too vast 
For any harvest but those of the past.
The barns have half returned into the hills,
The lilacs have grown wild as whippoorwills, 
There are no hosts of young men now to lay 
Such stonewalls up as once shut cows and hay 
In little universes of serenity.
Daisies flow here like whitecaps on the sea, 
They fill the world with airy, living honey 
Through afternoons remote and deep and sunny. 
The houses are the kind men built when life 
Meant many children when one took a wife, 
Meant staying in one place until the land 
Fitted a man as plow-hafts fit the hand,
Three generations on a summer 's day 
Working thigh to thigh and making hay,
Boys yearning to get married and have sons 
Before they finished being their fathers ' ones. 
And now the fields are empty, the wild rose
Is coming back, the wild honey flows,
And the pinewoods are widening again
Across the fields that once were tame as men.
—Robert P. Tristam Coffin 

Two Poems

Memory Exercise

Summon back now, when the sun is whitening
that sullen window-square at the foot of your bed, 
Time's clock-tick beatings in the dark on your eyelids 
and your thought upon the inexhaustible dead.

Here you shall find strength for the day' s breaking. 
Surge of bell-tower sound will be no more
an impulse to this emptiness of question
like fog upon a low, rock-girdled shore.

Thinking on Stars

It is pleasant to remember stars are shining.
In the arched dark, not seen for the roof between,
they hold a patient, unregarded circling,
nor pause to question what their course may mean.

And I shall sleep tonight, and for more nights after, 
soundly, because of knowledge they are there.
Grooved in law, against the slow defilement
of years, they wheel aloft through the soundless air. 
—Earl Daniels

Small Moment

In winter, as in arrested being,
I remember spring, summer, and autumn;
All color of those seasons withheld
Save in the morning and the evening skies. 
Imperceptibly leaf-bud comes into leaf,
And at length it is the moment my hand 
Moves toward the elder blossom, its beauty 
Yielding to utility of winestock;
This is the moment between and before: 
Within my hand the balsam seedpod bursts 
And at my touch the poppy sways upon
Its stem like a reptile-headed shaker;
Yet my hand withdraws from the orange lichen; 
Man cannot have his being and retain
About him outward vestiges of growth;
I choose from all wild and purple asters 
Before I take the darkest of them all.
I know each of these is a small moment,
Yet I who take the blossom and the fruit 
Cannot change all: it is the moment
The bittersweet unhasps the brilliant berry,
And now in December the last flake shrouds 
The withered fruit, and partially budded vine.

—Ethel B. Arehart

To a Ship's Lantern

Your light had winked with starlight on the sea 
And crept into the circling mist, and hung
On crests when waves turned mountains soon to be 
Hurled down to hissing valleys ; you had swung
To drowsy rhythms while the island lights 
Danced out to you from some enchanted shore—
And now you glow into whatever nights
May find this inland road beside his door.

When first his rolling stride had turned this way 
He said he keeps you with a dream or two . . .
To share the little time he has to stay,
And you are polished daily, bright as new.
He always lights you when the sun goes down—
In case a sailor finds the little town!
—Glenn Ward Dresbach