No peace/The skyscraper

NO PEACE

A curse is on man, the curse of his hungers;

There is no peace for man, no peace, no rest

Ever on earth because of the gnawing hungers

Forever, forever contending in his breast.

Happy a man who could watch without sighing

The frail brief flowering of the cherry tree;

Happy the heart that could lie still as a pool

Before beauty and beauty's unsolved ecstasy.

Man and his hungers build the world over

Nearer, nearer to their heart's desire...

(Nearer? Nearer? Never any nearer:

Man and his hungers change like fire.)

He builds and destroys; he builds and hunger;

He watches the sky, his hand on his breast.

Happy the man who can name his chimaera,

Desired forever, forever unpossessed.

THE SKYSCRAPER

San Francisco Telephone Building

What are you building up there so high?

I am lifting a flower up into the sky.

Did ever a lily so lithe and neat

Grow to the sun from a stone street?

Elsa Gidlow

Chance

Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.

If it had been a rose
I might have smiled and pinned it to my dress:
We should have said Good Night casually
And never met again.
But the white iris!
It looked so infinitely pure
In the thin green moonlight.
A thousand little purple things
That had trembled about me through the young years
Floated into a shape I seem always to have known
That I suddenly called Love!

The faint touch of your long fingers on mine wakened me.
I saw that your tumbled hair was bright with flame,
That your eyes were sapphire souls with
hungry stars in them,
And your lips were too near not to be kissed.

Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.


Elsa Gidlow



(29 December 1898 – 8 June 1986) She was a poet, who in 1923 published the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry in the United States: On A Grey Thread. She promoted alternative spiritualities including Buddhism and Goddess Worship. In the 1940s she founded a rural retreat center, The Druid Heights Artists Retreat, in Marin County, California. She lived there until her death in 1986. Other residents at Druid Heights have included well-known figures such as her close friend Alan Watts and feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon.