Tangled Hair/Dream-Flowers
Dream-Flowers
Amidst the dark
Of my past life
There glows a crimson light
Out of my twentieth year.
Lovely was the shooting star
As my love and I
Walked across the plain
Where the crickets sang.
The sting of death lies in this:
We may not take with us
A golden casket
Filled with memories of love.
“Do not lose yourself
At the forked way of life,
O young man!”
So saying,
I closed one path with a stone.
Every time my love
Hears the ridicule of the world,
He lays down his pen
And broods.
I am never more forlorn
Than when I watch the wavering
Of the heart of the man I love—
Though my eyes see it not.
When I take up my pen to write to him,
A woman out of her mind
Shrieks and wails
In the world upon the paper.
Ink has stained my weary fingers.
I shall now stop writing
My resentful thoughts
And go to sleep.
Strange that you should divide
Our love into two halves,
When I make one perfect whole.
I shall snatch the thunder
And throw it at the man.
He deems me weak and helpless.
I say to you not a word.
Know that you are facing a mountain.
’Tis the punishment
I lay upon you this half-day.
At last I made my love confess
That two women share his heart.
With that knowledge gained, alas,
I now repent my foolish art.
An ice cold wind
Passed between you and me,
And the distance of a foot
Became a thousand miles.
O this dreary struggle
That lurks in our home!
You beat yourself
And I myself.
Though we watch the ship-wreck
Between us two,
You raise not your hand in rescue,
Nor I mine.
Had I not fulfilled this love,
What then would have been my fate?
Though such wondering is vain and foolish,
Still—
Although this self denies life
In a world yet to come,
It still creates a dream-world
That could never exist in this.
When I bemoan the agony of living,
Sweet is the taste of tears
That stream down my cheeks.