five poems
1.
LATE in the winter came one day When there was a whiff on the wind, a suspicion, a cry not to be heard
of perhaps blossoms, perhaps green grass and clean hills lifting rolling shoulders.
Does the nose get the cry of spring first of all? is the nose thankful and thrilled first of all?
2.
If the blossoms come down
so they must fall on snow
because spring comes this year
before winter is gone,
then both snow and blossoms look sad:
peaches, cherries, the red summer apples,
all say it is a hard year.
3.
The wind has its own way of picking off the smell of peach blossoms and then carrying that smell miles and miles.
Women washing dishes in lonely, farmhouses stand at the door and say, "Something is happening." 4.
A little foam of the summer sea of blossoms,
a foam finger of white leaves, shut these away— high into the summer wind runners.
Let the wind be white too.
Gold buttons in the garden today—
Among the brown-eyed susans the golden spiders are gambling.
The blue sisters of the white asters speak to each other.
After the travel of the snows—
Buttercups come in a yellow rain,
Johnny-jump-ups in a blue mist—
Wild azaleas with a low spring cry.
NOCTURN CABBAGE
CABBAGES catch at the moon.
It is late summer, no rain, the pack of the soil cracks open, it is a hard summer.
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the
leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

The sky of gray is eaten in six places,
Rag holes stand out.
It is an army blanket and the sleeper slept too near the fire.
SILVER POINT
The silver point of an evening star dropping toward the hammock of new moon over Lake Okoboji, over prairie waters in Iowa— it was framed in the lights just after twilight.

"Summer, you are the eucharist of death;
Partake of you and never again Will midnight foot it steeply into dawn,
Dawn veer into day,
Nor the praised schism be of year split off year.
All time would be some tatters
On a figure, and the arrested sun—
Which are one."
Allen Tate

Iron guns of Vicksburg
Once boomed through your branches,
Whistling and whirling
Green leaves to the ground:
You were the hope of the south,
Here bugles blared, here flags were flung, here regiments
raised a ragged cheer,
Here too the site of many a shallow grave At which some blue-eyed farmer's boy clutched at the
bloody grass.
You guarded too the stately house With its white fluted pillars;
Smooth-ruffled silks within were spread beneath the lustres,
Low bosoms gleamed, the fiddlers scraped like mad;
The music shook you as you dreamed within the moonlight,
Mad kisses and low murmurs thrilled your branches: Spurs clinked as voices from the verandah started Dixie,
And long-curled gallants drank a toast to the new-born Stars and Bars.
Dusky and strong,
Dusky, deep-green,
Jade green and faint gold,
You stand now apart.
Apart from this age and its impotent clamor,
Its ravening fury, its pillage of ultimate destruction;
Apart from all things, dreaming only
Of an empire lost and forgotten,
Blown like the faint perfume from your chalices of snow,
Spreading about your dark trunk and your deep heavy
shade to draw me In the stifling slow midsummer days to the red-brown
Southland still.
John Gould Fletcher