Harper’s Magazine Sara Teasdale
THE FLIRT
Beautiful boy, lend me your youth to play with;
My heart is old.
Lend me your fire to make my twilight gay with,
To warm my cold;
Prove that the power my look has not forsaken,
That at my will
My touch can quicken pulses and awaken
Man’s passion still.
The moment that I ask do not begrudge me.
I shall not stay.
I shall have gone, ere you have time to judge me,
My empty way.
I am not worth remembrance, little brother,
Even to damn.
One kiss—O God! if I were only other
Than what I am!
Century Amelia Josephine Burr
YOUNG EDEN
Flushed from a fairy flagon
My country love and I,
Sat by a bush forgetting,
Old conscience and his fretting,
Just dreaming there and letting
Trouble trundle by—
Like a dragon
Dead on a wagon
Drawn against the sky.
Fol de rol de raly O—
Trouble in the sky!
She knew it was only a cloud I saw
When I pointed out a dangling claw,
But she let me say my say;
For the day, red-ripe, was a pretty day
And she thought my way was a city way.
And O I liked her thinking—while each unhindered curl
Glinted in the sunlight, hinted of its yellow—
That I who spoke to such a girl
Was something of a fellow.
Fol de rol de raly O!
Was she really thinking so?
There’s the tree, I gaily told her,
Apples, apples, at our feet!
Come, before we’re one day older,
We shall gather, we shall eat!
Now’s the time for apple hunger!
Not if we were one day younger,
Younger, older, shyer, bolder,
Would an apple taste so sweet!
Fol de rol de raly O!
Apples at our feet!
Bewildered, she was with me on the run
Toward the tree that held its treasure to the sun;
This, of all the trees of treasure, was the one
Condemning leisure
And inviting lovely pleasure—
She was with me, she was by me on the run,
With a cheek that turned its treasure to the sun.
Fol de rol de raly O!
Raly O, we gaily go,
Fol—