Part 27 (1/2)

A Lady. [Amy Lowell]

You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune Played upon a harpsichord; Or like the sun-flooded silks Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes, And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing, With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me, And I grow mad with gazing At your blent colours.

My vigour is a new-minted penny, Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust, That its sparkle may amuse you.

The Child in Me. [May Riley Smith]

She follows me about my House of Life (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) She has no part in Time's relentless strife She keeps her old simplicity and truth -- And laughs at grim Mortality, This deathless Child that stays with me -- (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!)

My House of Life is weather-stained with years -- (O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.) Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears, The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray.

One after one its guests depart, So dull a host is my old heart.

(O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay!)

For jealous Age, whose face I would forget, Pulls the bright flowers you bring me from my hair And powders it with snow; and yet -- and yet I love your dancing feet and jocund air.

I have no taste for caps of lace To tie about my faded face -- I love to wear your flowers in my hair.

O Child in Me, leave not my House of Clay Until we pa.s.s together through the Door, When lights are out, and Life has gone away And we depart to come again no more.

We comrades who have travelled far Will hail the Twilight and the Star, And smiling, pa.s.s together through the Door!

The Son. [Ridgely Torrence]

I heard an old farm-wife, Selling some barley, Mingle her life with life And the name ”Charley”.

Saying, ”The crop's all in, We're about through now; Long nights will soon begin, We're just us two now.

Twelve bushels at sixty cents, It's all I carried -- He sickened making fence; He was to be married --

It feels like frost was near -- His hair was curly.

The spring was late that year, But the harvest early.”

Muy Vieja Mexicana. [Alice Corbin]