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Drowning
no end to it
Yeats should have discovered Byzantium
as no country for old women
yet they refuse to die
they clutter up the earth
the blood of old women continues to cry out
to sing even to dance wildly in their veins
Sometimes the blood of an old woman rustles
like a started bird when love's stealthy step
cracks the dry undergrowth in the frosty air
as if a firecracker were exploding
It seems that love is a hunter of undiscriminating taste
Women old enough to know better--through God is never old enough--
dream deeper and deeper into the wood
like misty -eyed girls they once were
Suddenly one will stop astounded as the trap
love has set closes its steel jaws on a foot of frail bones
This morning very early in this silent house of sleepers
when my eyes opened from the mercy of my own darkness
the world came to me like a blow
It's beauty burned gold in every resurrected leaf
burned with a still flame Spring never relents
What was I doing here? What was I doing here?
Behind the house the trees slept in their cool shadows
At night old woman on her narrow bed
probing the dark with a stubborn mind
demanding answers she knows she will not find
tends with a fierce joy the unextinguished embers
of a not so temperate love
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