Sun-Up, and Other Poems Part 3

It's smoky-blue and still over the red road.

Wind must be lying down with its tail under it-- doesn't even flick off the flies.

And you can hear the silence buzzing in the gum trees, the way the angels buzzed when they flew through the cedars of Lebanon with thin gauze wings you could see through.

Nice to hear the silence buzzing-- till it comes too close and booms in your ears and presses all over you till you scream....

When you scream at the silence it goes to jingling pieces like a silver mirror broken into tiny bits.

Perhaps its wings are made of gla.s.s-- perhaps it lives down in a dark, dark cave and only comes up to warm its wings in the sun....

It's cold in the cave-- no matter how you cover yourself up.

Little girls sit there dressed in white and the dolls in their arms all have white handkerchiefs over their faces.

Their shadows cannot play with them...

their shadows lie down at their feet...

for the little girls sit stiff as stones with their backs to the mouth of the cave where a little light falls off the wings of the silence when it comes down out of the sun.

Moon catches the flying fish as they dive in the bay.

Flying fish spin over and over slippity-silver into the water.

Mom bends over jungles and touches the foreheads of tigers as they pa.s.s under openings made by dropped leaves.

Tigers stop on the trail of the deer while the moon is on their foreheads-- they let the stags go by.

Moon is shining strangely on the white palings of the fence.

Fence keeps very still...

most times it moves a little...

everything moves a little though you mayn't know it...

but now the little fence wouldn't change places with the great cross that stands so stiff and high with its back to the moon.

Moon shining strangely on the white palings of the fence, I am shining too but my light is shut inside of me and can't get out.

Old house with black windows-- blind house begging moonlight to put out the shadows-- why do you want so much light?

You creak when the wind steps on you-- you cough up dust and your beams ache-- you know you will soon fall, the moon just pities you!

Don't waste yourself moon-- come on my bed and play with me.

Wrap me up in blue light, you who are cool.

I am too hot, I am all alive and the shadows are outside of me.

There are different kinds of shadows.

The blind ones are the shadows of things.

These are the tame shadows-- they love to play on the wall with you and follow you about like cats and dogs.

Sometimes they hiss at you softly like snakes that do not bite, or swish like women's dresses, but if you poke a candle at them they pull in their heads and disappear.

But there is a shadow that is not the shadow of a thing...

it is a thing itself.

When you meet this shadow you must not look at it too long...

it grows with your looking at it...

till you are all alone with nothing around you...

nothing... nothing... nothing...

but a shadow with its eyes full of black light.

There's a shadow in the corner of the shed, crouching, lying in wait...

a black coiled shadow, watching... ready to strike...

but I mustn't be afraid of it-- I mustn't be afraid of anything.

Poor evil shadow, the candle would chase it away only she can't get at it.

Do you think that every one hates you, shadow with your back to the wall, afraid to lie down and sleep?

But I don't hate you.

Even the moon means to be kind.

She just treads on you as I'd tread on a worm that I didn't see.

Don't be afraid of me, shadow.

See--I've no light in my hand-- nothing to save myself with-- yet I walk right up to you-- if you'll let me I'll put my arms around you and stroke you softly.

Are you surprised I'd put my arms around you?

Is it your black black sorrow that n.o.body loves you?

V

JUDE

When you tell mama you are going to do something great she looks at you as though you were a window she were trying to see through, and says she hopes you will be good instead of great.

When you are five years old you spend the day in the Gardens.

The gra.s.s is greener than cabbages, and orange lilies stand up very straight and will not curtsey to the sun when the wind tells them.

Only pansies bow down very low.

Pansies make little purple cushions for queen bees to stand on.

Bees have brown silk hair on their bodies.

If you are careful they will let you stroke them.

The trees over the marble man catch up all the sunbeams so the shadows have it their way-- the shadows swallow him up like a blue shark.

When you scoop a sunbeam up on your palm and offer it to the marble man, he does not notice...

he looks into his stone beard.

... When you do something great people give you a stone face, so you do not care any more when the sun throws gold on you through leaf-holes the wind makes in green bushes....

This thought makes me very sad.

Jude has eyes like tobacco with yellow specks on it and his hair is red as a red orange.

Jude and I have made a garden in the field that no one knows about.

We creep in and out through a little place where the barbed wire is down.

We lie in the long gra.s.s and crush dandelions between our two cheeks till the milk comes out on our faces.

We hold each other tight and the wind tip-toes all over us and pelts us with thistle-down.

Jude isn't afraid of shadows-- not even of the ones that have eyes in them.

And he can look in the face of the sun without blinking at all.

Hush! don't say sun so loud.