Gerald R. Lucas

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite; But black sin hath betrayed to endless night My worlds both parts, and (oh!) both parts must die. You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write, Pour new seas in mine [...]

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: Penelope did this too. And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day And undoing it all through the night; Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight; And along towards morning, when you think it will [...]

When in the chronicle of wasted timeI see descriptions of the fairest wights,And beauty making beautiful old rhymeIn praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,I see their antique pen would have expressedEven such a beauty as you master now.So [...]

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religionor cultural system. I am not from the Eastor the West, not out of the ocean or upfrom the ground, not natural or ethereal, notcomposed of elements at all. I do not exist,am not an entity in this world or the next,did [...]

Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,Lakes and moon and fires,Cloine tires,Holding her lips apart. Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon,Miracle made vesper-keeps,Cloine sleeps,And I’ll be sleeping soon. Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the moonwaves start,Radiant, resplendently she gleams,Cloine dreams,Lips pressed against my heart. —Jean Toomer

Go seek her out all courteously,     And say I come,Wind of spices whose song is ever     EpithalamionO, hurry over the dark lands     And run upon the seaFor seas and land shall not divide us     My love and me. Now, wind, of your good courtesy     I pray you go,And come into her little garden     And sing at her window;Singing: The bridal wind [...]

I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,My careless sprawler,And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,That have become the land of your self-strangeness.What long seduction of the bone has led youDown the imploring roads I cannot takeInto the arms of ghosts I never knew,Leaving my manhood on a rumpled fieldTo guard you where [...]