LOLA RIDGE QUOTES
poet (1873-1941)
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- Life
- You have been good to me....
- You have not made yourself to dear
- to juggle with.
- I shall know you, secrets
- by the litter you have left
- and by your bloody footprints.
- Dreams only change their houses.
- They cannot be lined up against a wall
- And quietly buried under ground,
- And no more heard of ...
- However deep the pit and heaped the clay--
- Like seedlings of old time
- Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--
- Dreams will to light.
- You are full of unshaped dreams
- You are laden with beginnings
LOLA RIDGE, "Wind in the Alleys"
- Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel-
- Not mere tongues dividing, but soul from soul,
- So that never again should men be able
- To fashion one infinite, towering whole.
- Let me cradle myself back
- Into the darkness
- Of the half shapes ...
- Of the cauled beginnings ...
- Let me stir the attar of unused air,
- Elusive ... ironically fragrant
- As a dead queen's kerchief ...
- Let me blow the dust from off you ...
- Resurrect your breath
- Lying limp as a fan
- In a dead queen's hand.
LOLA RIDGE, dedication to her mother, Sun-up: And Other Poems
- Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
- In a vesture of gold--
- Spun of innumerable arcs,
- Flaring and multiplying--
- Gold at the uttermost circles fading
- Into the tenderest hint of jade,
- Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
- Robing the far-flung offices,
- Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
- Or soaring to luminous amethyst
- Over the steeples aureoled.
- As for the common men apart,
- Who sweat to keep their common breath,
- And have no hour for books or art--
- What dreams have these to hide from death!
- Night calls to the sandhills
- and gathers them under her.
- She pushes away cities
- because their sharp lights
- hurt her soft breast.
- Even candles make a sore place
- when they stick in the night.
- Broadway,
- In ambuscades of light,
- Drawing the charmed multitudes
- With the slow suction of her breath--
- Dangling her naked soul
- Behind the blinding gold of eunuch lights
- That wind about her like a bodyguard.
- Better--while life is quick
- And every pain immense and joy supreme,
- And all I have and am
- Flames upward to the dream ...
- Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,
- Burning out the quick.
LOLA RIDGE, "Dedication", The Ghetto and Other Poems
LOLA RIDGE, "Frank Little at Calvary"
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