For about a week, off and on, we've experienced ice and snow here in North Carolina.  I've had time to revisit favorite poems, and I'll share these with you now.

 Four Favorite Poems

Old Farmer

His hearing left him twenty years ago,
Before his wife went out below the snow
And left him all her quilts and comforters.
He has inherited that room of hers,
The kitchen, where she lived and cooked her way
Into the thoughts he had by night and day
His being deaf had made him miss her less.
When she went, he changed one loneliness
For another, old silence for a new,
He took over things she tended to
In her kitchen with her pots and pans
His cooking is the kind that is mans, 
And he eats off the stove what he has cooked.

Some nights his first year all alone he looked
Up from eating just as though she might
Be coming home from somewhere in the night, 
And he could be ashamed of his not waiting.
The room seemed very large to him, 
the grating let the firelight out upon the wall,
He missed her shadow there the most of all.

But now he never looks up at the place,
He sits and eats and never turns his face
Any night towards the outside door;
And yet, somehow, he misses her the more.
His mind confuses things, and he will sit
Quiet, and be sure of it,
Sure that when he gives his way to bed,
Shielding the lamp-globe level with his head,
And turns the quilts back, he will find her keeping
A warm place there for him and love and sleeping.

Source: Robert P. Tristram Coffin; The Macmillan Company, 1939. 356 pgs

RELUCTANCE

Out through the fields and the woods 
And over the walls I have wended; 
I have climbed the hills of view 
And looked at the world, and descended; 
I have come by the highway home, 
And lo, it is ended. 
The leaves are all dead on the ground, 
Save those that the oak is keeping 
To ravel them one by one 
And let them go scraping and creeping 
Out over the crusted snow, 
When others are sleeping. 
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, 
No longer blown hither and thither; 
The last lone aster is gone; 
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither; 
The heart is still aching to seek, 
But the feet question 'Whither?' 
Ah, when to the heart of man 
Was it ever less than a treason 
To go with the drift of things, 
To yield with a grace to reason, 
And bow and accept the end 
Of a love or a season? 

Robert Frost {1874-1963) 

FOUR WINDS

"Four winds blowing through the sky,
You have seen poor maidens die,
Tell me then what I shall do
That my lover may be true."
Said the wind from out the south,
"Lay no kiss upon his mouth,"
And the wind from out the west,
"Wound the heart within his breast,"
And the wind from out the east,
"Send him empty from the feast,"
And the wind from out the north,
"In the tempest thrust him forth;
When thou art more cruel than he,
Then will Love be kind to thee." 

 Sara Teasdale[1884-1933]

DREAM 

 I had left dreaming--

Till there came the look of you

And I could not tell after that,

And the soul of you

And I could not tell,

And at last the touch of you

And I could tell then less than ever,

Though I silvered and fell

As at the very mountain-brim

of dream.

 from The Beloved Stranger

 Harold Witter Bynner  (1881-1968)

For more Bynner, visit a previous post:http://open.salon.com/blog/scupper/2009/05/10/sampling_witter_bynner_american_poet