Yvor Winters Poems

This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
...

Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.
...

I, one who never speaks,
Listened days in summer trees,
Each day a rustling leaf.
...

My mother
Foresaw deaths
And walked among
Chrysanthemums,
...

Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.
...

The calloused grass lies hard
Against the cracking plain:
Life is a grayish stain;
The salt-marsh hems my yard.
...

The grandeur of deep afternoons,
The pomp of haze on marble hills,
Where every white-walled villa swoons
Through violence that heat fulfills,
...

Where I walk out
to meet you on the
cloth of burning
fields
...

The night was faint and sheer;
Immobile, road and dune.
Then, for a moment, clear,
A plane moved past the moon.
...

The branches,
jointed, pointing
up and out, shine
out like brass.
...