In truth, I can so believe.
In truth, I can so believe.
Where is my boy, my boy --
In what far part of the world?
I knew of the eagle souls that flew high in the sunlight,
Above the spire of the church, and laughed at the church,
Disdaining me, not seeing me.
Not knowing breath, though you tried so hard,
With a heart that beat when you lived with me,
And stopped when you left me for Life.
That is the direction, no doubt.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
Take its meaning to heart:
You too may walk, after the hills at Miller's Ford
Seem no longer far away;
Long after you see them near at hand,
Beyond four miles of meadow;
And after woman's love is silent,
Saying no more: I will save you.
Benjamin Pantier as a cry
Of votes for women: Ka dook -- dook!
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,
Writers of music and tellers of stories
Sit at his feet,
And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.
At last you get in-but you hear a step:
The ogre, Life, comes into the room,
(He was waiting and heard the clang of the spring)
To watch you nibble the wondrous cheese,
And stare with his burning eyes at you,
And scowl and laugh, and mock and curse you,
Running up and down in the trap,
Until your misery bores him.
The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune,
Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm.
Hear me, ambitious souls,
Sex is the curse of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
We cannot speak.
They have chiseled on my stone the words:
'His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.
Then I put him in a cage
Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me
When I offered him food.
I beat the windows, shook the bolts,
And hid me in a corner-
And then she died and haunted me,
And hunted me for life.
In my last sickness I was in agony, but I was resolute
And I cursed God for my suffering;
Still He paid no attention to me;
He left me alone, as He had always done.
To be judged by you,
The soul of me hidden from you,
With its wound gangrened
By love for a wife who made the wound,
With her cold white bosom, treasonous, pure and hard,
Relentless to the last, when the touch of her hand,
At any time, might have cured me of the typhus,
Caught in the jungle of life where many are lost.
Those who first oppose a good work, seize it and make it their own, when the cornerstone is laid and memorial tablets are erected.
I awoke one morning with the love of God
Brimming over my heart, so I went to see Richard
To settle the fence in the spirit of Jesus Christ.
Pine trees, a lake, a summer sky.
Some there were
Who frowned not on the cup but loathed the rule
Democracy achieved thereby, the freedom
And lust of life it symbolized.
My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
And I say to all, beware of ideals,
Beware of giving your love away
To any man alive.
There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
Good in themselves, but evil toward each other:
He oxygen, she hydrogen,
Their son, a devastating fire.
And then they arrested me as a witness,
And I lost my train and staid in Spoon River
To wage my battle of life to the end.
And they lighted a torch of hope and intuition
And desire which the Shadow,
Leading me swiftly through the caverns of darkness,
Could not extinguish.
An after dinner speaker, writing essays
For local clubs.
Your voice is very metallic this morning, Hortense Robbins --
Almost like a guinea hen's!
A mirror scratched reflects no image-
And this is the silence of wisdom.
She took the pity from my heart,
And made it into smiles.
the bait that you crave is in view:
A woman with money you want to marry,
Presitge, place, or power in the world.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle-
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories.
Nothing in life is alien to you:
I was a penniless girl from Summum
Who stepped from the morning train in Spoon River.
The inner kernel is freedom,
It is light, purity --
I can no more,
Find the goal or lose it, according to your vision.
You believed in the joy of life.
Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.
My soul had entered in the clay,
Fighting like seven devils.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
You had cured my diseased soul.
True, I trailed back home, a broken failure,
When Ralph disappeared in New York,
Leaving me alone in the city --
But life broke him also.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure--
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
If you had been
My happiness would I not have clung to you?
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories