She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems Read Online Free PDF

sake
    Who can’t perform that task.
    I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not;
    But then you’re mad to take offence
    That I don’t give you what I have not got:
    Use your own common sense.
    Let bygones be bygones:
    Don’t call me false, who owed not to be true:
    I’d rather answer “No” to fifty Johns
    Than answer “Yes” to you.
    Let’s mar our pleasant days no more,
    Song-birds of passage, days of youth:
    Catch at today, forget the days before:
    I’ll wink at your untruth.
    Let us strike hands as hearty friends;
    No more, no less; and friendship’s good:
    Only don’t keep in view ulterior ends,
    And points not understood
    In open treaty. Rise above
    Quibbles and shuffling off and on:
    Here’s friendship for you if you like; but love,—
    No, thank you, John.

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story
    GWENDOLYN BROOKS
    â€”—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes
    on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
    And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—
    When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed;
    Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
    Looking off down the long street
    To nowhere,
    Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
    And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?
    And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—
    When you have forgotten that, I say,
    And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
    And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
    And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
    That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
    To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
    Or chicken and rice
    And salad and rye bread and tea
    And chocolate chip cookies—
    I say, when you have forgotten that,
    When you have forgotten my little presentiment
    That the war would be over before they got to you;
    And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
    And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
    Bright bedclothes,
    Then gently folded into each other—
    When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
    Then you may tell,
    Then I may believe
    You have forgotten me well.

The End
    ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
    The last thing of you is a doll, velveteen and spangle,
    silk douponi trousers, Ali Baba slippers that curl up at the toes,
    tinsel moustache, a doll we had made in your image
    for our wedding with one of me which you have.
    They sat atop our coconut cake. We cut it
    into snowy squares and fed each other, while God watched.
    All other things are gone now: the letters boxed,
    pajama-sized shirts bagged for Goodwill, odd utensils
    farmed to graduating students starting first apartments
    (citrus zester, apple corer, rusting mandoline),
    childhood pictures returned to your mother,
    trinkets sorted real from fake and molten
    to a single bar of gold, untruths parsed,
    most things unsnarled, the rest let go
    save the doll, which I find in a closet,
    examine closely, then set into a hospitable tree
    which I drive past daily for weeks and see it still there,
    in the rain, in the wind, fading in the sun,
    no one will take it, it will not blow away,
    in the rain, in the wind,
    it holds tight to its branch,
    then one day, it is gone.

MARRIAGE
    G ETTING MARRIED WAS THE BEST DECISION I have ever made. Not only is my husband the most wonderful person imaginable, but at the time, it was such a relief to have it all over with! Even though I was a first-year law student determined to concentrate on my professional options, getting married took over my life. To be honest, it had always been a major preoccupation for me, my friends and cousins. We spent countless childhood hours planning imaginary weddings. Would we elope? Could we bring our ponies? What would our bridesmaids wear, especially if they were on their ponies. When I hit my twenties and people started getting married for real, weekends were consumed with bridal