William Carlos Williams

Item

	This, with a face
	like a mashed blood orange
	that suddenly

	would get eyes
	and look up and scream
	War! War!

	clutching her
	thick, ragged coat
	A piece of hat

	broken shoes
	War! War!
	stumbling for dread

	at the young men
	who with their gun-butts
	shove her

	sprawling--
	a note
	at the foot of the page



                   [from An Early Martyr at Other Poems, 1935]

from: Spring and All (1923)

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--

The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.