Poems

If you have pity, pity me a little, For I had seen your pitiless lips and dared them And I deserve the pity given fools... Your mouth was passion but your eyes were love. Your mouth might soon consent to harshness, but your eyes, Your eyes would see me and be kind to me. I should not suffer, loving you. I should but carry the heroic pain of love. Wounds that might come from hardness of your heart, If I received them, I should heal, watching the everlasting pity of your eyes... If you have pity, pity me a little. I who had seen your cruelty and dared it Am stricken with it now And have come through the streets in daylight As though the daylight were the sound of laughter Surrounding and consuming me. I have put up my hands to ward it off, The heaviness of light that would not let me hide But held me and looked leering in my face... For there has come a passer-by .... And you have come with him. I have no hatred for the passer-by, and none for you, But hatred only of my own humiliation, For I had challenged and been overthrown... If you have pity, pity me a little. For I who love life Have heard its mouth despise me And have seen its eyes, that had been kind, turn into stone. Wherefore I lack new strength, new laughter. And in the time before that strength is due, If you have pity, pity me a little. But if you have none—soon I shall have no need. For I who choose life, Shall receive my strength, And I shall come to you again, laughing with love... For my humiliation shall have been a rain, Its arms about me and its lips alive. And I shall walk in daylight And it shall be a singing waterfall Surrounding me and pouring over me.

“It shows you on that paper where she lives, In Sicily. Write her that I today Am dead for having killed my second man.” “Your second?” “Yes, sir, two. It’s not so bad To kill a trooper. But I killed, before, A friend who, like my brother and like me, Loved her in Sicily. The jury thought My brother did it. He’s been all alone In jail eight years. Tell her I shall be glad If now she gets him out and marries him.”

Truth heard him ask employ And took him in, A poor unfriended boy, As her own kin, And everything she made She taught the youth. When he had learned her trade He went from Truth. And when his eyes were dim And he was rich, Then Truth returned to him Out of a ditch, Poorer than he had been, Pleading she came... He would not let her in Nor ask her name.

Shall marriage never be the glory That was wooed? But ever enervate and vex, Obstruct, intrude, And make more wistful and complex The solitude, Trying to tell the human story To its brood? No matter how the homes are humming In a mood Of ecstasy or sentiment Or love renewed, What favored two can circumvent The ancient feud?— Till both in one shall die, becoming Multitude!