Donald Justice: Всі вірші поета

Всі вірші Оригінали Переклади

« ‹ 1 2 3 › »

To A Ten-Months' Child

Late arrival, no

One would think of blaming you

For hesitating so.

Who, setting his hand to knock

At a door so strange as this one,

Might not draw back?

Donald Justice

The Evening of the Mind

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;

Here is the shadow moving down the page

Where you sit reading by the garden wall.

Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,

Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,

Faintly the martyred peaches crying out

Your name, the name nobody knows but you.

Donald Justice

On The Death Of Friends In Childhood

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven

Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;

If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,

forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands

In games whose very names we have forgotten.

Come memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

Donald Justice

Sadness

Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,

Why were you so sad on porches, whispering?

What great melancholies were loosed among our swings!

As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering

And marks each small change in the atmosphere,

So was it then to overhear and to fear.

Donald Justice

Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy

Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover. Metal stand. Instructions included.

— Sears, Roebuck Catalogue

O my coy darling, still

You wear for me the scent

Of those long afternoons we spent,

The two of us together,

Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes

Of household spies

Donald Justice

Men at Thirty

Thirty today, I saw

The trees flare briefly like

The candles upon a cake

As the sun went down the sky,

A momentary flash

Yet there was time to wish

Before the break light could die

If I had known what to wish

Donald Justice

Love's Strategems

But these maneuverings to avoid

The touching of hands,

These shifts to keep the eyes employed

On objects more or less neutral

(As honor, for time being, commands)

Will hardly prevent their downfall.

Stronger medicines are needed.

Already they find

Donald Justice

In Bertram's Garden

Jane looks down at her organdy skirt

As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,

For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,

And she catches it up about her waist,

Smooths it out along one hip,

And pulls it over the crumpled slip.

On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,

Asleep is Bertram that bronze boy,

Donald Justice

A Map Of Love

Your face more than others' faces

Maps the half-remembered places

I have come to I while I slept—

Continents a dream had kept

Secret from all waking folk

Till to your face I awoke,

And remembered then the shore,

And the dark interior.

Donald Justice

Poem

This poem is not addressed to you.

You may come into it briefly,

But no one will find you here, no one.

You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,

You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.

The poem will go on without you.

It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

Donald Justice

In Memory Of The Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn

But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

T. S. ELIOT

It was his story. It would always be his story.

It followed him; it overtook him finally—

The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

Probably at the end he was not yet sorry,

Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley.

It was his story. It would always be his story,

Donald Justice

A Birthday Candle

Thirty today, I saw

The trees flare briefly like

The candles on a cake,

As the sun went down the sky,

A momentary flash,

Yet there was time to wish

Donald Justice