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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Florence Kiper Frank

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

To J. L.

Florence Kiper Frank

OFTEN within the house where we have met

You are an aching presence and a pain,

The cruel obsession of a tortured brain

With only you and loss of you beset.

Each room where you have moved is a regret;

In every spot some self of you is slain.

And “Oh,” I question, “must he die again,

And die a thousand deaths till I forget!”

But when I plunge into the moving street,

Into the vital sunlight and keen air,

When face to face and life to life I meet

My living brothers, all the old despair

Falls from me; in the faces that I greet,

And in the quickened heart-throbs, you are there.