“And in the dark church, like a ghost, / Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, another modern sonnet:


Bookmarks, Thomas Hornsby Ferril

A bookmark for an album such as this
Should be a ribbon with a cross-stitched phrase
Pressed neatly into Milton's hymns of praise,
Yet here is none, but in this book of his
That crossed the prairies with him long ago,
I find pale blades of buffalo grass to tell
Sweet pages where he could love Philomel,
And Phyllida and Cynthia and Chloe.
Here is a wedding song, stained by a leaf
Of mountain aspen, plucked when June was ripe;
If he marked other verse, I find no more,
But on one page, attuned to death and grief,
Are ashes from the embers of his pipe,
That must have spilled and did not reach the floor.


Ferril was a Denver-based journalist and poet. His first collection was the 1926 winner of Yale Younger Poets Competition, and he served as Colorado's poet laureate 1979-1988. I found this in an anthology of poems of the American west.

---L.

Subject quote from In Memoriam A.H.H., section 67, Alfred the Tennyson.

Comments

[cmcmck]

This is a delight and reminds me of my inherited edition of Don Camillo which came from my grandma and which has four leaved clovers as bookmarks! :o)

[larryhammer]

Neat!