Chamodi Waidyathilaka

“The First Spring Day

I wonder if the sap is stirring yet,
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun And crocus res are kindling one by one:
Sing, robin, sing;
I still am sore in doubt concerning Spring.
I wonder if the springtide of this year
Will bring another Spring both lost and dear;
If heart and spirit will nd out their Spring,
Or if the world alone will bud and sing:
Sing, hope, to me;
Sweet notes, my hope, soft notes for memory.
The sap will surely quicken soon or late,
The tardiest bird will twitter to a mate;
So Spring must dawn again with warmth and bloom,
Or in this world, or in the world to come:
Sing, voice of Spring,
Till I too blossom and rejoice and sing.”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“Dream Land
Where sunless rivers weep° Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a charméd sleep:
Awake her not.
Led by a single star,
She came from very far
To seek where shadows are
Her pleasant lot.°
She left the rosy morn,
She left the elds of corn, For twilight cold and lorn°
And water springs.
Through sleep, as through a veil, She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.
Rest, rest, a perfect rest Shed over brow and breast; Her face is toward the west, In the long ago.”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“nothing lay so clear
before those who stood
on these banks than the great
canopy of sky that spread
above them and poured forth
its endless light
and everything it seemed
stood eternal here
all that was laid bare
or the golden light
of grain heading out
in summer calls them all
and gazing into it
they see summers
spread everywhere before
them flowing through
the air generations of the sun
standing in sheaves
while over all of them
the silent river and
the grass against their feet
a star unmoving
stands beyond anyone’s grasp
this is the light that draws them all into
the dream of what will be
when they no longer walk here
possibility
rises in the light
as if every dawn
turned departure toward
endless arrivals
where only the rising sun
holds time in its light
asleep upon our hands
but of the past of all
who stand here it is
somewhere other than now
intermittent in
the sky as if it were
the moon floating away
and all that is recalled
growing dimmer through
the evenings of the mind”
― E.D. Blodgett, Poems for a Small Park

“The Bourne
Underneath the growing grass,
Underneath the living owers, Deeper than the sound of showers: There we shall not count the hours
By the shadows as they pass. Youth and health will be but vain,
Beauty reckoned of no worth:
There a very little girth
Can hold round what once the earth
Seemed too narrow to contain.”
― Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti in Poetry and Prose