AT THE OLD LADIES' HOME
by: Ruth Guthrie Harding
(1882-?)
- HERE in
a row of chairs upon the porch
- I saw them, women alien from the world,
- Set in a niche to watch the world go by:
- A few, born saints . . . but some had outworn sin;
- Sisters at last, from having done with life.
-
- Here Joan of Arc, grown past her soldier-dream,
- And Mariamne, spared her Herod's wrath,
- Forgetting Herod, gossiped for an hour;
- While calm Francesca, once knowing Paolo's love,
- Sat knitting peaceful in the noonday sun,
- And Nicolette, with Aucassin long gone,
- Made painful writing with a wrinkled hand.
-
- "Ah, let me die," I prayed, "before the glow
- Shall leave my body, and before my tears
- Shall buy me patience; take me while I feel
- The lure-of-things that blesses with its hurt--
- Dear God, give me not age!" (For I would keep
- You in my heart of hearts . . . for whose sad eyes
- These lines are set, O Dearest . . . to the last.)
-
- Just then, among the many faces there,
- I glimpsed a face most delicate and pale
- And very lovely with that wistfulness
- In which the shadows of long sorrow lie;
- Meeting my look, she smiled, and, with that smile,
- Somehow the lilacs by the iron fence,
- The plumed grass brushing low across the path,
- Brought back to me an afternoon in May
- And a sweet garden where I sometimes played
- When I fared forth in gingham pinafore:
- I saw Another (dead so many years,
- Her name I could not in that hour recall):
- Old she had been as ashes in a jar
- She kept upon a high, old-fashioned chest
- In an old-fashioned room in her still house . . .
- Now I remembered with what passionate warmth
- A cheek had once been pressed against my cheek,
- What frail and trembling arms had lifted me
- To touch that silvery dust within the jar.
-
- Perhaps it is God's will I shall grow old
- And none may read beneath my quietness . . .
- Gardens in May, or any memory
- Of you! And yet for very shame to-night
- I change my prayer, and ask for strength to live.
"At the Old Ladies' Home"
is reprinted from Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916.
Ed. William Stanley Braithwaite. New York: Laurence J. Gomme,
1916. |
MORE POEMS BY RUTH GUTHRIE HARDING |
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