TO MARIE SUKLOFF—AN ASSASSIN

In your lips moving fervently,
Your eyes hot with fire,
Life seems immortally young with desire,
Life seems impetuous,
Hungrily free,
Having no faith but its burning to be.
You could dance laughingly,
Draw where you move,
Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.
Youth be a carnival,
Life be the queen,
You could go dancing and singing and seen!
Whence came that tenderness
Cruel and wild,
Arming with murder the hand of a child?
Whence came that breaking fire,
Nursed and caressed
With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?
In your soul sacredly,
Deeper than fear,
Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?
Virgin of murder,
Was it God's breath,
Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?

TO AN ACTRESS

You walk as vivid as a sunny storm
Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes
Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,
Making passionate and making young.
You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,
And in the sultry place of custom raise
The naked colors of abounding life,
And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.

EYES

My heart is sick because of all the eyes
That look upon you drinkingly.
They almost touch you with their fever look!
O keep your beauty like a mystic gem,
Clear-surfaced—give no fibre grain of hold
To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!
My heart is sick!
O love, let not my heart
Corrupt the flower of your liberty—
Go spend your beauty like the summer sky
That makes a radius of every glance,
And with your morning color light them all!