Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump:
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

In the false dawn when the chickens blink
And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at to-morrow,
And the east fixes a pink half-eye this way,
In the time when only one milk wagon crosses
These three streets, these six street ends,
It is the sleep time and they rest.

The triangle banks and drug stores rest.
The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep.
The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk.

CLEAN CURTAINS

New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets.

The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun's bonnet.

One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard cartons.

The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels whirled dust-there was dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire-dust of police

and fire wagons-dust of the winds that circled at midnights and noon listening to no prayers.

"O mother, I know the heart of you," I sang passing the rim of a nun's bonnet-O white curtains-and people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the faded ramshackle at Congress and Green.

Dust and the thundering trucks won-the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way-was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?

A. E. F.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.

A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.

The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.

Forefingers and thumbs will point absently and casually toward it.

It will be spoken among half-forgotten, wished-to-beforgotten things.

They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good

work.

NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD

Stuff of the moon

Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,

And round the creep of the wave line,

Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters

Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

GRASS

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work-

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years

after graduation she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school. In 1905 she went abroad, studying archæology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

"Her death," writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, was tragic. Full of the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished." She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of the unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published in 1918.

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall.

A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?

ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown,

By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A