Wild Peaches

Full text online at Poetry Foundation

• When the world turns completely upside down
  You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
  Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
  We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
  You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
  Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
  Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
  We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
  • 1

• The winter will be short, the summer long,
  The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
  Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
  All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
  The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
  Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.
  • 1

• When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
  Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak,
  We shall live well — we shall live very well.
  • 3

• Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
  There’s something in this richness that I hate.
  I love the look, austere, immaculate,
  Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
  There’s something in my very blood that owns
  Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
  A thread of water, churned to milky spate
  Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.
  • 4

• I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
  Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
  That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
  Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
  Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
  And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.
  • 4

A Crowded Trolley Car

Full text online at Poetry Foundation

• The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray
  Sharp as golden sands,
  A bell is clanging, people sway
  Hanging by their hands.

• Orchard of the strangest fruits
  Hanging from the skies;
  Brothers, yet insensate brutes
  Who fear each others’ eyes.

• One man stands as free men stand
  As if his soul might be
  Brave, unbroken; see his hand
  Nailed to an oaken tree.