For I shall learn from flower and leaf, That color every drop they hold, To change the lifeless wine of grief To living gold.

Though I know he loves me, tonight my heart is sad; his kiss was not so wonderful as all the dreams I had.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pool singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Stephen kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all. Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest, Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes Haunts me night and day.

My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.

Call him wise whose actions, words, and steps are all a clear because to a clear why.