Monday, April 29, 2013

toward the summer isle

I am in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood, and having kind of a shitty day, but here is a poem that makes me feel just a little less like killing everyone in the world.

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
   And against the morning's white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
    Have sheltered for the night,
We'll turn our faces southward, love,
   Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
   And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
   Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
   And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
   Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
   And ferns that never fade.

—Claude McKay (1889-1948), "After the Winter" in this case from Claude McKay: Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

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