ANNE KNISH
Opus 67
I WOULD not in the early morning
Start my mind on its inevitable journey
Toward the East.
There are white domes somewhere
Under that blue enameled sky, white domes, white domes;
Therefore even the cream
Is safest yellow.
Cream is better than lemon
In tea at breakfast
I think of tigers as eating lemons.
Thank God this tea comes from the green grocer,
Not from Ceylon.
EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 13
O PEACOCK-FEATHER
Drawn through a death-dim hole,
With colors blurred together,
Persian pattern of a soul—
Is it enough to have belonged
To the exaltation of a bird
Round whom they thronged
Each time her high tail stirred?
. . . I loved a woman whose two eyes,
One blue, one gray,
Would block
Like cliffs my foothold in the skies . . .
She is dead, they say—
Dead as a peacock.
ANNE KNISH
Opus 126
HIS eyes
Are the resurrection.
Once when beneath the moonrise
They looked into mine,
Grey mists held mastery between us,
And I knew that his soul
Had gone down into death.
But tonight a golden star-dust
Is pouring through space,
And the mist is burned away by it.
Tonight his soul awakens
Out of its splendid cerements,
And through his eyes the miracle
Arises to the earth.
I have prayed long beside the tomb
And touched the grave-cloths
With living fingers.
I have lain my breasts
Against the granite
Of the sarcophagus
Where he was.
Prayers for the dead I offered up
And hecatombs.
Today there was a wonder in the sunrise.
I knew that there were glories in the sky
And new branches of willow on the earth.
And my soul trembled with prophecy.