I Don’t Know what became of the ten lost tribes of Israel: I don’t know how to say how-do-you-do to a king: I don’t know the exact meaning of my terror and despair: I don’t know why I love--why I ever love-- I Don’t Know whether laws of chance govern a spinning roulette wheel and ivory ball or whether chance is beyond law: I don’t know what kind of missile a Krupp gun shoots: I don’t know how a ground-and-lofty tumbler turns a triple air-summersault: I don’t know whether I really am the way I look in the mirror: I don’t know whether the Russian language has Romanic roots: I don’t know what is the wild power in poetry. I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin. I Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘girl’: I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of Thread. I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the mystic common-place infinitudes. --those give me a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw-- _A life-long lonely word_ To-morrow Fleeting times I wonder if it is my defect or others’ that no human family tie holds and warms me. There is none. I think about it with wistfulness. The only tie-of-blood feeling that clings to me is of my warming and keeping-alive. And it is very feeble. It grows more feeble. It is a trivial matter as I look at it universally. But as I look at it earthlily: there would be an abnormalness, a lostness in one when the mother who bore her got from it at best but a small cool dislike. It makes me feel humanly lost. ‘Lost’ is the shuddering life-long lonely word that brushes against me some nights and noons. _Their voices_ To-morrow Every day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin clear air. A public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day, and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-listening. Their Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous, very woful meanings.