“Rose in her hair and ears with rings, / Voice of the wind in the grass”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday another cummings sonnet, this time on the opposite side of the year:

before the fragile gradual throne of night, e. e. cummings

before the fragile gradual throne of night
slowly when several stars are opening
one beyond one immaculate curving
cool treasures of silence
                                      (slenderly wholly
rising,herself uprearing wholly slowly,
lean in the hips and her sails filled with dream—
when on a green brief gesture of twilight
trembles the imagined galleon of Spring)

somewhere unspeaking sits my life;the grim
clenched mind of me somewhere begins again,
shares the year’s perfect agony.    Waiting

(always)upon a fragile instant when

herself me(slowly, wholly me)will press
in the young lips unearthly slenderness


Originally published as number V of the section “Sonnets—Actualities” in his 1925 collection &.

---L.