To Beauty

O Beauty, tyrant of our tears,

The worn and single stem of life,

Within the clusters of your bloom

Is hid the metal of your knife.

I throw myself, in desperate hope,

Across the harvest of your blades,

Charlotte Wilder

Crying for hurt, to make me feel

The authenticity of shades

Who wander, it is said, in Hell...

And sweeten it, as they may do,

Casting from their own stricken flesh

The mordant being owed to you.

Resolved but not resigned to die,

We stagger still among our trees,

Looking for pasture, and a place

That is the flowering end of these.

Charlotte Wilder