Verses

Verses
Susan Coolidge

Susan Coolidge

Verses

TO J. H. AND E. W. H

Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew,
Your sweet youth budded and your sweet lives grew,
And all the world seemed rose-beset for you.

The rose of beauty was your mutual dower,
The stainless rose of love, an early flower,
The stately blooms of ease and wealth and power.

And treading thus on pathways flower-bestrewn,
It well might be, that, cold and careless grown,
You both had lived for your own joys alone.

But, holding all these fair things as in trust.
Gently you walked, still scattering on the dust
Of harder roads, which others tread, and must,—

Your heritage of brightness, not a ray
Of noontide sought you out, but straight away
You caught and halved it with some darker day:

And as the sweet saint's loaves were turned, it is said,
To roses, so your roses turned to bread,
That hungering souls and weary might be fed.

Dear friends, my poor words do but paint you wrong,
Nor can I utter, in one trivial song,
The goodness I have honored for so long.

Only this leaf, a single petal flung,
One chord from a full harmony unsung,
May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue.

PRELUDE

Poems are heavenly things,
And only souls with wings
May reach them where they grow,
May pluck and bear below,
Feeding the nations thus
With food all glorious.

Verses are not of these;
They bloom on earthly trees,
Poised on a low-hung stem,
And those may gather them
Who cannot fly to where
The heavenly gardens are.

So I by devious ways
Have pulled some easy sprays
From the down-dropping bough
Which all may reach, and now
I knot them, bud and leaf,
Into a rhymed sheaf.

Not mine the pinion strong
To win the nobler song;
I only cull and bring
A hedge-row offering
Of berry, flower, and brake,
If haply some may take.

COMMISSIONED

"Do their errands; enter into the sacrifice with them; be a link yourself in the divine chain, and feel the joy and life of it."—ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY

What can I do for thee, Beloved,
Whose feet so little while ago
Trod the same way-side dust with mine,
And now up paths I do not know
Speed, without sound or sign?

What can I do? The perfect life
All fresh and fair and beautiful
Has opened its wide arms to thee;
Thy cup is over-brimmed and full;
Nothing remains for me.

I used to do so many things,—
Love thee and chide thee and caress;
Brush little straws from off thy way,
Tempering with my poor tenderness
The heat of thy short day.

Not much, but very sweet to give;
And it is grief of griefs to bear
That all these ministries are o'er,
And thou, so happy, Love, elsewhere,
Never can need me more:—

And I can do for thee but this