If ever a garden was a Gethsemane,

with old tombs set high against

the crumpled olive tree—and lichen

this, my garden has been to me.

For such as I none other is so sweet;

Lacking old tombs, here stands my grief,

and certainly its ancient tree.

Peace is here and in every season

a quiet beauty.

The sky falling about me

evenly to the compass. . .

What is sorrow but tenderness now

in this earth-close frame of land and sky

falling constantly into horizons

of east and west, north and south;

what is pain but happiness here

amid these green and wordless patterns,--

indefinite texture of blade and leaf;

Beauty of an old, old tree,

last comfort in Gethsemane.

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,

I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,

Into your flaming heart;

Then did I hear crisp, crinkled laughter

As the furies after tore him apart?

A bird, next, small and humming,

Looked into your startled depths and fled. . . .

Surely, some dread sight, and dafter

Than human eyes as mine can see,

Set the stricken air waves drumming

In his flight.

Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,

I cannot see, I cannot hear your flutey;

Voice lure your loving swain,

But I know one other to whom you are in beauty

Born in vain:

Hair like the setting sun,

Her eyes a rising star,

Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar

All your competing;

Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,

Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet. .

Ah, how the sense reels at my repeating,

As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies

Beating, beating.

Earth, I thank you

for the pleasure of your language

You’ve had a hard time

bringing it to me

from the ground

to grunt thru the noun

To all the way

feeling seeing smelling touching

—awareness

I am here!

“Your garden at dusk

Is the soul of love

Blurred in its beauty

And softly caressing;

I, gently daring

This sweetest confessing,

Say your garden at dusk

Is your soul. My Love.”

Turn an earth clod

Peel a shaley rock

In fondness molest a curly worm

Whose familiar is everywhere

Kneel

And the curly worm sentient now

Will light the word that tells the poet what a poem is

Life-long, poor Browning never knew Virginia,

Or he’d not grieved in Florence for April sallies

Back to English gardens after Euclid’s linear:

Clipt yews. Pomander Walks, and pleached alleys;

Primroses, prim indeed, in quiet ordered hedges,

Waterways, soberly, sedately enchanneled,

No thin riotous blade even among the sedges,

All the wild country-side tamely impaneled . . .

Dead, now, dear Browning lives on in heaven,—

(Heaven’s Virginia when the year’s at its Spring)

He’s haunting the byways of wine-aired leaven

And throating the notes of the wildings on wing:

Here canopied reaches of dogwood and hazel,

Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,

Fleet clapping rills by lush fern and basil,

Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with pines . . .

Think you he meets in this tender green sweetness

Shade that was Elizabeth . . . immortal completeness!

Oh, I who so wanted to own some earth,

Am consumed by the earth instead:

Blood into river

Bone into land

The grave restores what finds its bed.

Oh, I who did drink of Spring’s fragrant clay,

Give back its wine for other men:

Breath into air

Heart into grass

My heart bereft—I might rest then.

Being a Negro Woman is the world's most exciting

game of "Taboo": By hell there is nothing you can

do that you want to do and by heaven you are

going to do it anyhow—

We do not climb into the jim crow galleries

of scenario houses we stay away and read

I read garden and seed catalogs, Browning,

Housman, Whitman, Saturday Evening Post

detective tales, Atlantic Monthly, American

Mercury, Crisis, Opportunity, Vanity Fair,

Hibberts Journal, oh, anything.

I can cook delicious things to eat. . .

we have a lovely home—one that

money did not buy—it was born and evolved

slowly out of our passionate, poverty-

striken agony to own our own home.

happiness