Babette Deutsch Poems

Fawns in the winter wood
Who feel their horns, and leap,
Swans whom the bleakening mood
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These are the streets where we walked with war and childhood
Like our two shadows behind us, or
Before us like one shadow.
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Content that now the bleeding bone be swept
Out of her reach, she lay upon her side.
In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept
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If you press a stone with your finger,
Sir Isaac Newton observed,
The finger is also
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What do we need for love—a midnight fire
Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney
In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow,
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And there was stormy silence in that city,
A silence of the unborn where it moved
In darkness, piteous, but without pity,
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Heat urges secret odors from the grass.
Blunting the edge of silence, crickets shrill.
Wings veer: inane needles of light, and pass.
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Sunrise tumbling in like a surf,
A foam of petals, curling thousands, lightly crumbling
Away into light.
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Little finger of fiery green, it
flickers over stone. Waits
in a weed's shadow.
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