Wild Duck

I

That was a great night we spied upon
See-sawing home,
Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars
Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze...
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...
Lights dwindling to shining slits
In the wet asphalt...
Purring lights... red and green and golden-whiskered...
Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud...
... But you did not know...
As the trains made golden augers
Boring in the darkness...
How my heart kept racing out along the rails,
As a spider runs along a thread
And hauls him in again
To some drawing point...
You did not know
How wild ducks' wings
Itch at dawn...
How at dawn the necks of wild ducks
Arch to the sun
And new-mown air
Trickles sweet in their gullets.

II

As water, cleared of the reflection of a bird
That has lately flown across it,
Yet trembles with the beating of its wings,
So my soul... emptied of the known you... utterly...
Is yet vibrant with the cadence of the song
You might have been....
'Twas a great night...
With never a waste look over a shoulder
Curved to the crook of the wind...
And a great word we threw
For memory to play knuckles with...
A word the waters of the world have washed,
Leaving it stark and without smell...
A world that rattles well in emptiness: Good-by.

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge, was an Irish-American anarchist poet and influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. Best known for her long poems and involvement in various social movements, Ridge's work addressed issues such as oppression and social justice. She published her first book of poems, "The Ghetto and Other Poems," in 1918, which gained her considerable acclaim. Ridge's poetry often focused on the lives of immigrants and the working class.

Lola Ridge

Iron Wine

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Electricity

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Wall Street At Night

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Debris

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

English

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Under-Song

There is music in the strong
        Deep-throated bush,
Whisperings of song
        Heard in the leaves' hush -
Ballads of the trees
        In tongues unknown -
A reminiscent tone
        On minor keys...

Boughs swaying to and fro
        Though no winds pass...
Faint odors in the grass
        Where no flowers grow,
And flutterings of wings
        And faint first notes,
Once babbled on the boughs
        Of faded springs.

Is it music from the graves
        Of all things fair
Trembling on the staves
        Of spacious air -
Fluted by the winds
        Songs with no words -
Sonatas from the throats
        Of master birds?

One peering through the husk
        Of darkness thrown
May hear it...

Lola Ridge

London Voluntaries - To Charles Whibley - II - Andante Con Moto

Forth from the dust and din,
The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,
The odour and sense of life and lust aflare,
The wrangle and jangle of unrests,
Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and win -
As from swart August to the green lap of May -
To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts
Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware
In any of her innumerable nests
Of that first sudden plash of dawn,
Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large,
Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day
In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn
Forward and up, in wider and wider way,
Shall float the sands, and brim the shores,
On this our lith of the World, as round it roars
And spins into the outlook of the Sun
(The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge),
...

William Ernest Henley

Mother

I

Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors...
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.

You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall...
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.

II

(To E. S.)

You inevitable,
Unwieldy with enormous births,
Lying on your back, eyes open, sucking down stars,
Or you kissing and picking over fresh deaths...
Filth... worms... flowers...
Green and succulent pods...
Tremulous gestation
Of dark w...

Lola Ridge

The Wild Duck

Twilight. Red in the West.
Dimness. A glow on the wood.
The teams plod home to rest.
The wild duck come to glean.
O souls not understood,
What a wild cry in the pool;
What things have the farm ducks seen
That they cry so--huddle and cry?
Only the soul that goes.
Eager. Eager. Flying.
Over the globe of the moon,
Over the wood that glows.
Wings linked. Necks a-strain,
A rush and a wild crying.

A cry of the long pain
In the reeds of a steel lagoon,
In a land that no man knows.

John Masefield

Dawn Wind

Wind, just arisen -
(Off what cool mattress of marsh-moss
In tented boughs leaf-drawn before the stars,
Or niche of cliff under the eagles?)
You of living things,
So gay and tender and full of play -
Why do you blow on my thoughts - like cut flowers
Gathered and laid to dry on this paper, rolled out of dead wood?

I see you
Shaking that flower at me with soft invitation
And frisking away,
Deliciously rumpling the grass...

So you fluttered the curtains about my cradle,
Prattling of fields
Before I had had my milk...
Did I stir on my pillow, making to follow you, Fleet One?
I - swaddled, unwinged, like a bird in the egg.

Let be
My dreams that crackle under your breath...
You have the dust of the world to blow on...
Do not tag...

Lola Ridge

An Old Song.

    The wild duck fly over
        From river to river
    And so the young lover
        Goes roving for ever.

    They fly together,
        He walks alone:
    No maiden can tether
        Him with her moan.

    At the bursting of blossom
        On her breast his head;
    He has left her bosom
        Ere the apples are red.

    Across the valley,
        Singing he goes.
    In highway and alley
        He seeks a new rose.

    Tell me, O maidens,
        You who all day
    In lyrical cadence
        Dance and play,

    Why do you proffer
        Your sweets to one,
    Who takes all you offer
        And leaves you to moan?

Edward Shanks