• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I will confess; but that’s permitted me;

Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping

Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly

I might have held you for a summer more,

But at the cost of words I value highly,

And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—

I shall have only good to say of you.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

“No, Thank You, John”

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

I never said I loved you, John:

Why will you teaze me day by day,

And wax a weariness to think upon

With always “do” and “pray”?

You know I never loved you, John;

No fault of mine made me your toast:

Why will you haunt me with a face as wan

As shows an hour-old ghost?

I dare say Meg or Moll would take

Pity upon you, if you’d ask:

And pray don’t remain single for my sake

Who can’t perform that task.

I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not;

But then you’re mad to take offence

That I don’t give you what I have not got:

Use your own common sense.

Let bygones be bygones:

Don’t call me false, who owed not to be true:

I’d rather answer “No” to fifty Johns

Than answer “Yes” to you.

Let’s mar our pleasant days no more,

Song-birds of passage, days of youth:

Catch at today, forget the days before:

I’ll wink at your untruth.

Let us strike hands as hearty friends;

No more, no less; and friendship’s good:

Only don’t keep in view ulterior ends,

And points not understood

In open treaty. Rise above

Quibbles and shuffling off and on:

Here’s friendship for you if you like; but love,—

No, thank you, John.

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

——And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes

on a Wednesday and a Saturday,

And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—

When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed;

Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon

Looking off down the long street

To nowhere,

Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation

And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?

And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—

When you have forgotten that, I say,

And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,

And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;

And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,

That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner

To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles

Or chicken and rice

And salad and rye bread and tea

And chocolate chip cookies—

I say, when you have forgotten that,

When you have forgotten my little presentiment

That the war would be over before they got to you;

And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,

And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end

Bright bedclothes,

Then gently folded into each other—

When you have, I say, forgotten all that,

Then you may tell,

Then I may believe

You have forgotten me well.

The End

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

The last thing of you is a doll, velveteen and spangle,

silk douponi trousers, Ali Baba slippers that curl up at the toes,

tinsel moustache, a doll we had made in your image

for our wedding with one of me which you have.

They sat atop our coconut cake. We cut it

into snowy squares and fed each other, while God watched.

All other things are gone now: the letters boxed,

pajama-sized shirts bagged for Goodwill, odd