Edgar Bowers Time Poems
- 1. Autumn Shade
1
The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint
... - 2. The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten
All winter long you listened for the boom
Of distant cannon wheeled into their place.
Sometimes outside beneath a bombersâ?? moon
You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace
... - 3. John
Before he wrote a poem, he learned the measure
That living in the future gives a farm--
Propinquity of mules and cows, the charmed
Insouciance of hens, the fellowship,
... - 4. Clear-seeing
Bavaria, 1946
The clairvoyante, a major generalâ??s wife,
... - 5. The Virgin Considered As A Picture
Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed
Is touched with what reality we feel,
Bends to itself and, to itself resumed,
Restores a tender fiction to the real.
... - 6. The Poet Orders His Tomb
I summon up Panofskv from his bed
Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,
Suffers the stone-s mortality instead;
... - 7. The Mountain Cemetery
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots' broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
...