I shall make a song like your hair ... Gold-woven with shadows green-tinged, And I shall play with my song As my fingers might play with your hair. Deep in my heart I shall play with my song of you, _Gently_.... I shall laugh At its sensitive lustre ... I shall wrap my song in a blanket, Blue like your eyes are blue With tiny shots of silver. I shall wrap it caressingly, _Tenderly_.... I shall sing a lullaby To the song I have made Of your hair and eyes ... And you will never know That deep in my heart I shelter a song of you _Secretly_.... ADVICE You were a sophist, Pale and quite remote, As you bade me Write poems-- Brown poems Of dark words And prehistoric rhythms ... Your pallor stifled my poesy But I remembered a tapestry That I would some day weave Of dim purples and fine reds And blues Like night and death-- The keen precision of your words Wove a silver thread Through the dusk softness Of my dream-stuff.... TO A DARK GIRL I love you for your brownness And the rounded darkness of your breast. I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice And shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest. Something of old forgotten queens Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk And something of the shackled slave Sobs in the rhythm of your talk. Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate, Keep all you have of queenliness, Forgetting that you once were slave, And let your full lips laugh at Fate! YOUR SONGS When first you sang a song to me With laughter shining from your eyes, You trolled your music liltingly With cadences of glad surprise. In after years I heard you croon In measures delicately slow Of trees turned silver by the moon And nocturnes sprites and lovers know. And now I cannot hear you sing, But love still holds your melody For silence is a sounding thing To one who listens hungrily. FANTASY I sailed in my dreams to the Land of Night Where you were the dusk-eyed queen, And there in the pallor of moon-veiled light The loveliest things were seen ... A slim-necked peacock sauntered there In a garden of lavender hues, And you were strange with your purple hair As you sat in your amethyst chair With your feet in your hyacinth shoes. Oh, the moon gave a bluish light Through the trees in the land of dreams and night. I stood behind a bush of yellow-green And whistled a song to the dark-haired queen ... LINES WRITTEN AT THE GRAVE OF ALEXANDER DUMAS Cemeteries are places for departed souls And bones interred, Or hearts with shattered loves. A woman with lips made warm for laughter Would find grey stones and roving spirits Too chill for living, moving pulses ... And thou, great spirit, wouldst shiver in thy granite shroud Should idle mirth or empty talk Disturb thy tranquil sleeping. A cemetery is a place for shattered loves And broken hearts.... Bowed before the crystal chalice of thy soul, I find the multi-colored fragrance of thy mind Has lost itself in Death’s transparency.