One Long Chain

On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep 
By Robert Frost

A bird half wakened in the lunar moon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height,
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar,
On the long bead chain of repeated birth,
To be a bird while we are men on earth,
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.

One Inert Tongue

Echo
By A.E. Stallings

What tales we tell what talesWhat ails?
About the girls gone quietYet
The story-telling ones once
Who entertained the heartart
Till suddenly they ceased.eased
What makes the tongue inert?hurt.
What turns the voice to swordsWords,
Cutting the throat? What takesaches,
The name from the alibiI
Of the body? We were stern:turn
Stories, we said, are lies,ice,
We told her, don’t repeat them. eat them.

One Cleaved Burden

from In Memorium
By Alfred Tennyson

I know that this was Life,—the track
Whereon with equal feet we fared;
And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.

But this it was that made me move
As light as carrier-birds in air;
I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love:

Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
When mighty Love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.

One Knowledgeable Child

Drank lonesome water:
Weren't but a tad then
Up in a laurel thick
Digging for sang;

Came on a place where
The stones was holler;
Something below them
Tinkled and rang.

Dug where I heard it
Drippling below me:
Should a knowed better,
Should a been wise;

Leant down and drank it,
Clutching and gripping
The overhung cliv
With the ferns in my eyes.

...

I'd drunk lonesome water,
I knowed in a minute
Never larnt nothing
From then till today;

Nothing worth larning,
Nothing worth knowing.
I'm bound to the hills
And I can't get away.

...

I know where the grey foxes
Uses up yander,
Know what'll cure ye
Of ptisic or chills,

But I never been way from here,
Never got going:
I've drunk lonesome water,
I'm bound to the hills.

from Global Event
By Lucas Pingel

 ...just like the veins that stay
hidden until we age enough for our skin

to fall slack. Just like how a march races
to the coda the moment the conductor

moves his baton. No. Just like

the moment he sees his baton
and decides that it must be moved.