Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
They Came And They Went
They came and they went
And the wind kept on
They stood and they sat
The wind told them that

And of all the young girls in the western world
Who tried on new shoes
And combed their long hair
There was only one
One only
Who remained fair –

The wind —
Though she blew and blew and blew
And everything we once felt about her
Was untrue

We couldn’t then feel her cool gentle touch
Without wishing for someone
Who once was us
Or someone we knew and loved in a way
Like the blue and the sun and the grass and the hay

All is vanity

Goodbye to that world as it wends its way
To another fraught and hopeless mind
To another short day to everyone’s dismay
To another long season
To a childish whim
Raise your heart to the heavens
For there’s nothing to win
Ruth Lepson’s last book is on the way, new and selected poems (MadHat Press). Her other books are Dreaming in Color, Morphology, I Went Looking for You and ask anyone (which won the Philip Whalen Prize from Chax Press). She edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology. Her poems have been in many magazines and anthologies. She just retired, and is now poet-in-residence emerita at the New England Conservatory, where she taught for 25 years.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx