Babette Deutsch Poems

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
...

If you press a stone with your finger,
Sir Isaac Newton observed,
The finger is also
...

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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Into this net of leaves, green as old glass
That the sun fondles, trembling like images
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Sky is such softness, is such dark,
Mt as the pelt of a black panther is
In his den's bight. Under the mat soft black
...