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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Lola Ridge

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Edge

Lola Ridge

From “Chromatics”

I
I THOUGHT to die that night in the solitude where they would never find me …

But there was time …

And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain staring into the abyss.

I do not know how long …

I could not count the hours, they ran so fast—

Like little bare-foot urchins—shaking my hands away.

But I remember

Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein …

And a wind came out of the grass,

Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.

As the night grew

The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth

Fell in ashen folds about the hills,

Like hooded virgins pulling their cloaks about them …

There must have been a spent moon,

For the tall one’s veil held a shimmer of silver….

This too I remember,

And the tenderly rocking mountain,

Silence,

And beating stars…..

II
Dawn

Lay like a waxen hand upon the world,

And folded hills

Broke into a solemn wonder of peaks stemming clear and cold,

Till the Tall One bloomed like a lily,

Flecked with sun

Fine as a golden pollen.

It seemed a wind might blow it from the snow.

I smelled the raw sweet essences of things,

And heard spiders in the leaves,

And ticking of little feet

As tiny creatures came out of their doors

To see God pouring light into his star.

It seemed life held

No future and no past for me but this.

And I too got up stiffly from the earth

And held my heart up like a cup.