The White Bird

Lola Ridge 1873 – 1941



Man of the flame-eyes
And mouth with the bitter twist of in-grown laughter,
And little bald man . . . whose seeming stillness
Is akin to the velocity of a spinning star
Holding its perfect poise—
You two yea-sayers
Beetling over the little deniers,
Two great levelers, building from the earth up, among
puttiers and pluggers of rotten piles—
You of the rich life, running in ample measure, amidst
life deleted of its old raw fire as earth is deleted
of its coal and iron— You be mighty hunters and keepers,
Trotsky and Lenine—
Yet can you hold . . . the unconstrainable One
Of the slow and flaming deaths
And multiple resurrections ?

Hands, reaching in hundreds of millions,
Backs, straightening under the keeling floor of the world,
Can you hold the great white bird?—
She that sweeps low over the chain-gangs
When they glance up from their stone7breaking
Into morning's burning gold;
She that goes down into underground cells,
Sending the cool wind of her wings
Through unsevering stone . . .
And departs, unbeknown, from those who announce her,
Saying: 'Lo, she is ours!'

Ah, what a mighty destiny shall be yours,
Should you persuade her—
The Unconstrainable One
Who has slid out of the arms of so many lovers,
Leaving'not'a feather in their hands!

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 27, 2023

1:04 min read
131

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABXXXCAXXXXCDDXA XXXXXXXXDBC XBDCX
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,245
Words 212
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 16, 11, 5

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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