If only this was a perfect world
Where all could be set free
Where words were expressed
And read with love and devotion

If only there was never feuds
Where friends fell out at times
Where friendship was created
And it always reigned true

If only people could be equal
And forgive any injustice
So everyone could fit in
Instead of competing to win

If only poetry was that simple
To touch everyone in so many ways
That we could understand the true meaning
Where so many poems mean so many things

If only I could find the solution
To help make everyone find happiness
Where we love the friendship we have
Because then, I would find happiness too

The ring is on my hand,
  And the wreath is on my brow;
Satins and jewels grand
Are all at my command.
  And I am happy now.

And my lord he loves me well;
  But, when first he breathed his vow,
I felt my ***** swell—
For the words rang as a knell,
And the voice seemed his who fell
In the battle down the dell,
  And who is happy now.

But he spoke to reassure me,
  And he kissed my pallid brow,
While a reverie came o’er me,
And to the churchyard bore me,
And I sighed to him before me,
Thinking him dead D’Elormie,
  “Oh, I am happy now!”

And thus the words were spoken,
  And thus the plighted vow,
And, though my faith be broken,
And, though my heart be broken,
Behold the golden keys
  That proves me happy now!

Would to God I could awaken
  For I dream I know not how,
And my soul is sorely shaken
Lest an evil step be taken,—
Lest the dead who is forsaken
  May not be happy now.

Thou wouldst be loved?—then let thy heart
  From its present pathway part not;
Being everything which now thou art,
  Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways,
  Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise.
  And love a simple duty.

A neighbor of mine in the village
  Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a ******* the farm, she did
  A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
  To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
  And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner

Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
  And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
  An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
  On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
  Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,


She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
  Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
  Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
  And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
  Of all things but ****.

A hill each of potatoes,

Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
  And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
  That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
  Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
  When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,


Now when she sees in the village
  How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
  She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”
  Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
  To the same person twice.

The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill;
I had walked on at the wind’s will—
I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was—
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.

My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one.

From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory;
One thing then learned remains to me—
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.'
'This that we tread was, too, your father's land.'
'But this we tread bears the angelic gangs
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.'
'These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.'

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain.