TIME’S  NICK
 
Sands on the shore day after day 
where I stand hoping with the door ajar, 

idly pulling the wings off flies 
(I have never done this before,) 

while the sun throbs clockwork time 
and I tread the heels of my hungry shadow, 

wasting alone among time-worn daisies, 
nicks of time slipping through my fingers: 

and in the stillness a little mouse spinning, 
and then a bell, jingling on a worn stump: 

and O! that gnawing in the narrow ways 
with a hundred years crabbed in my knees! 

For truly I have fallen for a play of hands, 
fish in glove and hand in water. 

How sweetly he fondles the swan of my neck, 
and how madly I clutch the bull of his head! 

Time’s nick is in our nutshell, 
cup and lip, till the crack of doom

                     (1945)