The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

Chapter 40: HARPS IN HEAVEN

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that range from long, scene-setting pieces celebrating California's landscapes and the new art of the moving picture to playful rhymed scenarios and verse games. It interleaves meditations on history, myth, science, and religion with comic sketches and dialectal songs, moves into wartime reflections and elegies for fallen poets, and closes with local, Midwestern vignettes and personal tributes. The poet shifts between high-lyric description, satirical invective, and vernacular rhythms, experimenting with form and voice to present an uneven but energetic portrait of American life, technology, and regional identity in early twentieth-century verse.

HARPS IN HEAVEN

I will bring you great harps in Heaven,

Made of giant shells

From the jasper sea.

With a thousand burnt up years behind,

What then of the gulf from you to me?

It will be but the width of a thread,

Or the narrowest leaf of our sheltering tree.

You dare not refuse my harps in Heaven.

Or angels will mock you, and turn away.

Or with angel wit,

Will praise your eyes,

And your pure Greek lips, and bid you play,

And sing of the love from them to you,

And then of my poor flaming heart

In the far off earth, when the years were new.

I will bring you such harps in Heaven

That they will shake at your touch and breath,

Whose threads are rainbows,

Seventy times seven,

Whose voice is life, and silence death.