 Unanswered by Madison Cowain, read for LibriVox.org by Cornell Namesh, Reno Nevada. How long ago it is since we went to Maine? Since she and I went to Maine long ago. The years have left my forehead lined. I know, have seen my hair around the temple's grain. Time will change us. Yeah, I hear it saying. She, too, grows old. The face of rose and snow has lost its freshness. In the hairs, brown glow some strands of silver. Sadly, two are straying. The form you knew, whose beauty so unspelled, has lost the lightness of its loveliness. And all the gladness that her blue eyes have tears. And the world have hardened with distress. True, true I answer. Oh, years that part. These things are changed, but is her heart, her heart. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Love. The Interpreter by Madison Cowain. Read for LibriVox.org by Cornell Namesh, Reno Nevada. Thou art the music that I hear in sleep. The poetry that lures me on in dreams. The magic that holds my thought with themes of young romance. In Reverend's mystic keep. The lilies aura and the damask deep that close the rose. The whispering soul that seems to haunt. The wind that strings like some wild spirit. Towards the cataract's lip are glimmerings of thee. And I loveliness pervading all my world. Interpreting the marvel in the wonder this disclose. For lacking thee, to me were meaningless life. Love and hope, the joy of everything. And all the beauty that the wide world knows. End of poem. The recording is in the public domain. Love. Despised by Madison Cowain. Read for LibriVox.org by Sonia. Love. Despised. Why not resolve and hunt it from one's heart. This love, this God and fiend that makes a hell of all one's life. In ways no tongue can tell. No mind divine, nor any word in part. Would not one sink the slides that make hearts smart. The eyes of love's disdain. The wintry well of love's disfavor. Otherwise would quell. Or school one's nature, too, to its own art. Why will men cringe and cry forever here. For that which, once obtained, may prove a curse. Why not remember that, however fair, decay is wed to beauty. That each year robs somewhat from the riches of her purse. Until at last her house of pride stands bare. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Pearls by Madison Cowain. Read for LibriVox.org by Sonia. Pearls. Baroque but beautiful. Between the loons the valves of nacre of a mussel shell. A gold, a pearl. Shaped like the burnished bell of some strange blossom that long after noons of summer coaks to open. All the moons chased luster in it. Hues that only dwell with purity. It takes me, like a spell, back to a day when, whistling through in tunes, a barefoot boy, I waded mid the rocks, searching for shells, strewn in the creek's slow swirl, unconscious of the pearls that round me lay, while, mid-wild roses, all her tomboy locks blond-blowing, stood unnoticed then a girl, my sweetheart once, the pearl I flung away. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Woman Speaks. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org. Why have you come? To see me in my shame? A thing to spit upon? Despise and scorn? You, you who ask me, you, by whom was torn, then cast aside, like some vile rag, my name. What shelter could you give me? Now, that blame and loathing would not share, that wolves of vice would not besiege with eyes of glaring ice, wherein sin sat not with her face of flame. You love me? God, if yours be love, for lust, hell must invent another synonym. If yours be love, then hordom is the way to heaven and God, and not with soul, but dust must burn the faces of the cherubim. O beast of beasts, if yours be love, I say. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Of the Slums. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. Red faced as old carousel, and with eyes a hard, hot blue, rare a frowsy flame. Bold, dowdy, boozomed. From her window frame she leans. Her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slatter and slipper'd and in sluddish gown, with ribald mirth and words too vile to name. A new doll, tear sheet, glorying in her shame, armed with her fall staff, now she takes the town. The flaring lights of alleyway saloons, the reek of hideous gutters and black oaths of drunkenness from vice-infested dens. Our Tuber senses what the silvery moon's chase splendor is, and what the blossoming growths of earth and birdsong are too innocence. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Light and Wind. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. Where, through the myriad leaves of many trees, the daylight falls, barrel and chrysophase, the glamour and the glimmer of its rays seem visible music, tangible melodies, light that is music, music that one sees, Wagnerian music, where forever sways the spirit of romance, and gods and fays take form, clad on with dreams and mysteries, and now the winds transmuting necromanths touches the light and makes it fall and rise, vocal, a harp of multitudinous waves that speaks as ocean speaks, an utterance of far-off whispers, mermaid murmuring sighs, palagian, vast, deep down in coral waves, end of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Winds. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. Those hewers of the clouds, the winds that layer at the four compass points, are out tonight. I hear their sandals trample on the height, I hear their voices trumpet through the air, builders of storm, gods workmen, now they bear up the steep stair of sky, on backs of might, huge tempest-bulks, while, sweat that blinds their sight, the rain is shaken from tumultuous hair, now, sweepers of the firmament, they broom, like gathered dust, the rolling mists along heaven's floors of sapphire, all the beautiful blue of sky, corridor and airy room preparing, with a large laughter and loud song, for the white moon and stars to wonder through. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Touches. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. In Heavens of Rivered Blue. That sunset dies with galacious flame. Deep in the west, the day stands Midas-like, or, waiting on his way, touches with splendor all the twilight skies, each cloud that, like a stepping stone, he tries with rosy foot, transforms its sober gray to blazing gold, while, ray on crystal ray, within his wake the stars like bubbles rise, so should the artist in his work accord all things with beauty, and communicate his soul's high magic and divinity to all he does, and, hoping no reward, toil onward, making darkness, oriate, with light of worlds that be and are to be. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Earth and Moon. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. I saw the day, like some great monarch die, gold couched, behind the clouds rich tapestries, thin purple sandaled, clothed in silences of sleep through nails of sky lazuli, the twilight, like a morning queen, trailed by dim paged of dreams and shadowy mysteries, and now the night, the star-robed child of these, in meditative loveliness draws nigh, earth, like to Romeo, deep in dew and scent, beneath Heaven's window, watching till a light, like some white blossom, in its square beset, lifts a faint face onto the firmament that, with the moon, grows gradually bright, bidding him climb and clasp his Juliet. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Dusk. By Madison Collwine. Read for LiberVox.org by Kathleen. Corn colored clouds upon a sky of gold, and mid their sheaves, where, like a daisy bloom left by the reapers to the gathering gloom, the star of twilight flames, as Ruth, tis told, dreamed homesick mid the harvest fields of old, the dusk goes gleaning, color and perfume from Bible slopes of Heaven, that allume her pensive beauty deep in shadows stalled, hushed is the forest, and blue veil and hill are still, save for the brooklet, sleepily stumbling the stone with one foam fluttering foot, save for the note of one far whipper-will, and in my heart her name, like some sweet bee, within a rose, blowing a fairy flute. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. September. By Madison Collwine. Red for the bravox.org by Kathleen. The bubbled blue of morning glory spires, balloon-blown foam of moonflowers, and sweet snows of Climatis, through which September goes, song-hearted, rich in realized desires are flanked with hotter hues, with tawny fires of acrid marigolds, that light-long rows of lamps and salvias, red as days, red clothes, that torches seam, by which the month attires barbaric beauty, like some Asian queen, towering imperial in her two-fold crown, of harvest and of vintage, all her form gold and majestic purple, in her man the might of motherhood, her baby brown, abundance high on one exultant arm. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The end of summer by Madison Collwine. Red for the bravox.org by Kathleen. Pods are the poppies and slim spires of pods, the hollyhocks, the balsams pearly breeds of rose-stained snow, our little sacks of seeds collapsing at a touch. The loat, that sods the pond with green, has changed its flowers to rods and disks of vesicles, and all the weeds around the sleepy water and its reeds are one white smoke of seeded silk that nods. Summer is dead. I me. Sweet summer's dead. The sunset clouds have built her funeral pyre, through which Ian now runs subterranean fire, while from the east, as from a garden bed, mist vined, the dusk lifts her broad moon, like some great golden melon, saying fall has come. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Passing Glory by Madison Collwine. Red for laborbox.org by Kathleen. Slow sinks the sun, a great carbuncle ball, red in the cavern of a somber cloud, and in her garden, where the dense weeds crowd, among her dying asters stands the fall, like some lone woman in a ruined hall, dreaming of desolation and the shroud, or through decaying woodlands goes, down bowed, hugging the tatters of her gypsy shawl. The gaunt wind rises, like an angry hand, and sweeps the sprawling spider from its web, smites frantic music in the twilight's ear, and all around, like melancholy sand, rains dead leaves down, wild leaves that mark the ebb in earth's dark hourglass of another year. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Prototypes by Madison Collwine. Red for laborbox.org by Kathleen. Whether it be that we in letters trace the pure extractness of a wood bird's stream, and name it song, or with the brush attain the highest perfection of a wild flower's face, or mold in difficult marble all the grace we know as man, or from the wind and rain catch elemental rapture of refrain and mark in music to do time and place, the aim of art is nature, to unfold her truth and beauty to the souls of men in close suggestions, in whose forms is cast nothing so new but tis long beyonds old, nothing so old but tis as young as when the mind conceived it in the ages past. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Superstition by Madison Collwine. Red for laborbox.org by Kathleen. In the waste places, in the sinister night, when the wood whispers like a wandering mind, and silence sits and listens to the mid the rocks, to some wild torrents flight, bat-browed thou waitest with thy wisp of light, among black pools the moon can never find, or owlet eyed, thou hootest to the blind deep darkness from some cave, or haunted height, he who beholds but once thy fearsome face never again shall walk alone, but one terrible attendance shall be his. Unutterable things that have no place in God or beauty that compel him on against all hope, where endless horror is end of poem. This recording is in the public domain. AD 1900 by Madison Collwine. Red for laborbox.org War and disaster, famine and pestilence, vaunt couriers of the sentry that comes, behold them shaking their tremendous plumes above the world. Low, all the air grows dense with rumors of destruction and a sense. Cadaverus of corpses and of tombs predestined while like monsters in the glooms, bristiline with battle, shadowy and immense, the nations rise and dread apocalypse, where now the boast earth makes of civilization, its brag of Christianity. In vain we seek to see them in the wild eclipse of hell and horror, and the devastation of death triumphant on his hills of slain. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Uncalled by Madison Collwine. Red for by Larry Wilson. As one who journey westward with the sun, beholds at length from the uptowing hills, far off a land unspeakable beauty fills, so see in peaks and veils of avalan, and sinking weary watches one by one the big seas beat between, and knows its skills no more to try, that now as heaven wills this is the endless end that all is done. So tis with him whom long a vision led in quest of beauty, and who finds at last she lies beyond his effort, all the waves of all the world between them, while the dead, the myriad dead who populate the past with failure, hail him from forgotten graves. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Qua Trains by Madison Collwine. Red for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson. Moths and Fireflies. Since fancy taught me in her school of spells I know her tricks. These are not moths at all nor fireflies, but masking elfland bells whose link boys torch them to Titania's ball. Autumn Wildflowers. Like colored lanterns swung in elfin towers while morning glories liked the tangled ways and like the rosy rockets of the phase burns the sloped crimson of the cardinal flowers. The Wind and the Pines. When winds go on organing through the pines on hill and headland darkly gleaming me seems I hear sonorous lines of Iliads and the woods are dreaming. Opportunity. They hold a hag whom life denies a kiss as he rides questward in night errant wise only when he hath passed her is it his to know too late the fairy in disguise. Dreams. They mock the present and they haunt the past and in the future there is not a gleam with hope the soul desires that at last the heart pursuing does not find a dream. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Afterward by Madison Cowine read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson. What vague traditions do the golden eaves? What legends do the dawns inscribe in fire on heaven's azure leaves? The red sun colophons. What ancient stories do the waters verse? What tales of war and love do winds within the earth's vast house rehearse? God's stars stand guard above. Would I could know them as they are expressed in hue and melody, and say in words the beauties they suggest language, their mystery? And in one song magnificently rise the music of the spheres that more than marbles should immortalize my name in after years. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. End of poems by Madison Cowine volume 3.