Poems in Sonnets & Classical

The north face keeps its slow green script,
a lettering of ash and rust
that winter wrote and frost has kept,
the rain its only reader now.

I lean my palm against the grit
and feel how patient stone can be,
how moss prefers the shadowed slit
where sun forgets to fall. The oaks

above the hedge hold up their dark
ungenerous branches, blackbird-bare,
and every lichen is a mark
the cold has patience to prepare.

November fog comes up the lane
and thins the poplars one by one;
the wall grows vague, then vague again,
until the field and sky are none

but grey on grey. I turn my coat
and mind the stile, the muddy rung,
the single robin's single note
that keeps the silence well begun.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.