To Delia: On Her Endeavoring to Conceal Her Grief at Parting

...Hard is that heart, and unsubdued by love,
That feels no pain, nor ever heaves a sigh;
Such hearts the fiercest passions only prove,
Or freeze in cold insensibility.

Oh! then indulge thy grief, nor fear to tell
The gentle source from whence thy sorrows flow,
Nor think it weakness when we love to feel,
Nor think it weakness what we feel to show.

~William Cowper

Il Bacio

A kiss strikes like lightning;
love passes like a storm.

~Written on the wrapper of an Italian chocolate

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

~Anne Sexton

I Thought the Train Would Never Come

I thought the Train would never come --
How slow the whistle sang --
I don't believe a peevish Bird
So whimpered for the Spring --
I taught my Heart a hundred times
Precisely what to say --
Provoking Lover, when you came
Its Treatise flew away
To hide my strategy too late
To wiser be too soon --
For miseries so halcyon
The happiness atone --

~Emily Dickinson

Rain Before Dawn

The dull, faint patter in the drooping hours
Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair
With damp; the burden of the heavy air
Is strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,
Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers
Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:
The pounding of broad wings drifts down the stair
And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.

I lie upon my heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn
Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse
Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o'er the lawn,
Between the curtains brooding stares and stands
Like some drenched swimmer -- Death's within the house!

~F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Tuft of Kelp

All dripping in tangles green,
Cast up by a lonely sea,
If purer for that, O Weed,
Bitterer, too, are ye?

~Herman Melville

Ebb

I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

In A Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.

~Ezra Pound