I cut myself upon the thought of you
And yet I come back to it again and again,
A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out
From the dimness of the present
And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.
Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,
I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,
And only when the blood runs out across my fingers
Am I at all satisfied.
Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874 – 1925) was an American poetess that belonged to the informal imagist, an early modernist movement, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.