Tag: Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime”

by

Edna St. Vincent Millay

from Epitaph for the Race of Man

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Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime
From bark of holly bruised or mistletoe
Could have arrested, could have held you so
Through fifty million years of jostling time;
Yet cradled with you in the catholic slime
Of the young ocean’s tepid lapse and flow
Slumbered an agent, weak in embryo,
Should grip you straitly, in its sinewy prime.
What bright collision in the zodiac brews,
What mischief dimples at the planet’s core
For shark, for python, for the dove that coos
Under the leaves?—what frosty fate’s in store
For the warm blood of man,—man, out of ooze
But lately crawled, and climbing up the shore?

“There was upon the sill a pencil mark”

by

Edna St. Vincent Millay

---

There was upon the sill a pencil mark,
Vital with shadow when the sun stood still
At noon, but now, because the day was dark,
It was a pencil mark upon the sill.
And the mute clock, maintaining ever the same
Dead moment, blank and vacant of itself,
Was a pink shepherdess, a picture frame,
A shell marked Souvenir, there on the shelf.
Whence it occurred to her that he might be,
The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three -
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, 
    but only dead.