Fragment Friday - Winter Poetry

Winter on the windswept plains.

Winter Stars

By Sara Teasdale

I went out at night alone;

 The young blood flowing beyond the sea

Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—

 I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head

 From shadows shaken on the snow,

I saw Orion in the east

 Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,

 Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,

I watched Orion as a girl

 Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,

 The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,

All things are changed, save in the east

 The faithful beauty of the stars.

Source: Flame and Shadow (1920)

In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year

by W.S. Merwin

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young

Though I have long wondered what it would be like

To be me now

No older at all it seems from here

As far from myself as ever

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing

I imagine all the clocks have died in the night

Now no one is looking I could choose my age

It would be younger I suppose so I am older

It is there at hand I could take it

Except for the things I think I would do differently

They keep coming between they are what I am

They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably

It is how I have come to it

Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

There is nothing the matter with speech

Just because it lent itself

To my uses

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars

It is my emptiness among them

While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

W. S. Merwin, "In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year" Copyright © 1993 by W.S. Merwin,

Source: The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target The Lice The Carriers of Ladders Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Copper Canyon Press