After Storm

Lola Ridge 1873 – 1941



Was there a wind? Tap… tap… Night pads upon the snow with moccasined feet… and it is still… so still… an eagle's feather might fall like a stone. Could there have been a storm… mad-tossing golden mane on the neck of the wind… tearing up the sky… loose-flapping like a tent about the ice-capped stars?

  Cool, sheer and motionless
  the frosted pines
  are jeweled with a million flaming points
  that fling their beauty up in long white sheaves
  till they catch hands with stars.
  Could there have been a wind
  that haled them by the hair….
  and blinding
  blue-forked
  flowers of the lightning
  in their leaves?
  Tap… tap…
  slow-ticking centuries…
  Soft as bare feet upon the snow…
  faint… lulling as heard rain
  upon heaped leaves….
  Silence
  builds her wall
  about a dream impaled.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

40 sec read
76

Quick analysis:

Scheme A XXXBAXXCXCBXXXXBXXX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 817
Words 135
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 1, 19

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge was an anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde feminist and Marxist publications best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences She along with other political poets of the early Modernist period has been coming under increasing critical scrutiny at the beginning of the twenty-first century more…

All Lola Ridge poems | Lola Ridge Books

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    "After Storm" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/25879/after-storm>.

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