Quotes from Donald Justice

Come back now and help me with these verses. Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.

On the porch, green-shuttered, cool, Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy, Who, having wound her around a spool, Sends her spinning like a toy Out to the garden, all alone, To sit and weep on a bench of stone. Soon the purple dark will bruise Lily and bleeding-heart and rose, And the little Cupid lose Eyes and ears and chin and nose, And Jane lie down with others soon Naked to the naked moon.

Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain.

This poem is not addressed to you.]" This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter. The poem will go on without you. It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special, But as of something altogether common?

The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait, A revenge not only necessary but right and clever-- Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.