Lola Ridge Poems

Spires of Grace Church,
For you the workers of the world
Travailed with the mountains…
Aborting their own dreams
...

How should they appraise you, who walk up close to you as to a mountain, each proclaiming his own eyeful against the other's eyeful.

Only time standing well off shall measure your circumference and height.
...

Pythoness body—arching
Over the night like an ecstasy—
I feel your coils tightening…
And the world’s lessening breath.
...

Old plant of Asia -
Mutilated vine
Holding earth's leaping sap
In every stem and shoot
...

I love you, malcontent
Male wind -
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
...

Warped… gland-dry…
With spine askew
And body shrunken into half its space…
Well-used as some cracked paving-stone…
...

-Albert Parsons
went to his death
singing Annie Laurie;
didn't another have
...

Last night
I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea,
Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star,
Containing both as in a trembling cup.
...

Was there a wind? Tap… tap… Night pads upon the snow with moccasined feet… and it is still… so still… an eagle's feather might fall like a stone. Could there have been a storm… mad-tossing golden mane on the neck of the wind…
...

I

He walked under the shadow of the Hill
Where men are fed into the fires
...