The Faithful

By Jane Cooper

Once you said joking slyly, If I’m killed

I’ll come to haunt your solemn bed,

I’ll stand and glower at the head

And see if my place is empty still, or filled.

What was it woke me in the early darkness

Before the first bird’s twittering?

—A shape dissolving and flittering

Unsteady as a flame in a drafty house.

It seemed a concentration of the dark burning

By the bedpost at my right hand

While to my left that no man’s land

Of sheet stretched palely as a false morning....

All day I have been sick and restless. This evening

Curtained, with all the lights on,

I start up—only to sit down.

Why should I grieve after ten years of grieving?

What if last night I was the one who lay dead

While the dead burned beside me

Trembling with passionate pity

At my blameless life and shaking its flamelike head?

Romance

By Claude McKay

To clasp you now and feel your head close-pressed,

Scented and warm against my beating breast;

To whisper soft and quivering your name,

And drink the passion burning in your frame;

To lie at full length, taut, with cheek to cheek,

And tease your mouth with kisses till you speak

Love words, mad words, dream words, sweet senseless words,

Melodious like notes of mating birds;

To hear you ask if I shall love always,

And myself answer: Till the end of days;

To feel your easeful sigh of happiness

When on your trembling lips I murmur: Yes;

It is so sweet. We know it is not true.

What matters it? The night must shed her dew.

We know it is not true, but it is sweet—

The poem with this music is complete.