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Home  »  The New Poetry  »  Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar

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

Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar

By Allen Upward

The Milky Way

MY mother taught me that every night a procession of junks carrying lanterns moves silently across the sky, and the water sprinkled from their paddles falls to the earth in the form of dew. I no longer believe that the stars are junks carrying lanterns, no longer that the dew is shaken from their oars.