Marly Youmans

When Xerxes, king of Persia, was on the march,He met a beauty, marvelous and fair,And hung her round with costly ornaments,Tasking a man to be her paladin:So says the Persian-born Herodotus. Her lovely tent of green threshed light from air,And crooked, wide-flung branches sought the ground,Rambled, . . . . Continue Reading »

Truth is truth wherever it is found, In light-struck windowed hands of opal glass, In pebbles left in homage on a grave, In fingers shelling mounds of lady peas, In radiance that roosts inside the soul, In paint, in words, in whirling steps, in steel, In “rings of fire” as infant heads are . . . . Continue Reading »

Last night in dreams, she lived a thousand yearsAnd was the architect who made a houseThat wandered from the mountains to the sea. And in its rooms the strange and marvelousBegan to stir with songs and imagesAnd words of radiance by those who knew That every stone and changing face and treeWas . . . . Continue Reading »

In dream, she fished with silk of swans,Baited her hooks of hammered bronze With rainbow strips of cuttlefish,And might have paused to make a wish Or prayed her prayer for daily breadBefore she cast the humming thread Into the seven seas of years,Into the music of the spheres, Into the . . . . Continue Reading »

This gold and paint on board, the fillet in her hair—I see resemblance, yes, a slantways glimpse of her Though she is gone away—it was not made from life,For no one is so blithe to pain, as if a laugh Were trembling on her lips, as if the fur like grassAlong the dragon’s jaw were just . . . . Continue Reading »