Words
Words, breathing words, full—murmuring syllables!
How you enrich the thoughts that dwell in you
With far—brought perfume, that no meaning tells
Yet stirs the mind to flower in thoughts anew!
Sometimes how lulling like the rain’s soft veil,
Then vivid as the pressure of a hand,
Now filled with fair surmises like a sail.
Before the blue coast of some foreign land.
O words, you live and therefore you can die,
Ill—yoked, imprisoned, tamed in a dull task!
So callous tongues may use you, but not I,
Who for your grace, a wooing lover, ask.
Dead things may kill; and you being dead entomb
The frozen thought that once you clothed in bloom.
