Short Flights

Chapter 9: ESTRANGED.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

The collection gathers short lyrical poems and sonnets that meditate on seasonal change, love and its vicissitudes, friendship and parting, aspiration and disappointment, and quiet domestic and natural scenes. Many pieces favor intimate first-person reflection, blending pastoral imagery—gardens, birds, waves, and twilight—with moral and spiritual concerns about faith, striving, and memory. Varied short forms, occasional rondeau and sonnet sequences, produce compact musicality and a tone alternating between wistfulness and gentle affirmation, while recurring motifs of journey, secret longing, and consolation knit the individual lyrics into a unified contemplative arc.

ESTRANGED.

IT was but yesterday that thou

Wert with love-whispers eloquent,

Yet come and look upon her now

That life is spent.

How strangely white the face hath grown,

No longer prest by kisses fond;

Why turn’st, now that her soul hath flown

And rests beyond?

Why enter’st not the darkened room

To touch again those cold, white lips—

So cold and white, seen in the gloom

Of Death’s eclipse?

Thou wert so loving once, but now

Take that cold hand as lovers may,

Implant a kiss on that calm brow,

Nor turn away.

It was but yesterday that thou

Wert with love-whispers eloquent—

Thou wilt not look upon her now

That life is spent.