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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Robert J. Roe

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

Apprentice

Robert J. Roe

From “Interplanes”

YOU bid me sing

The deep harmonies of stars.

But how can I sing of stars

When I cannot chant for you

How mountains at sunset

Are like far-off purple isles

In a varnished saffron sea?

Or how shall I prophesy concerning planets

Who am unable

To explain how the bony-backed mesa,

With bare flanks blown in and out with shadows,

Is like a lean horse sniffing spring?