Wearing her lights like golden spangles.

Sara Teasdale is the reason I ever started writing poetry. I was 10 (!) and browsing the poetry section. I pulled an old faded green book from the shelf, opened its musty pages and started lapping up the words. They were just so pretty! I don't think, for the most part, that I could even conceive what she was writing about most of the time, but I was completely enchanted by the words themselves, each perfect turn of phrase.

::

Summer Night, Riverside

In the wild soft summer darkness
How many and many a night we two together
Sat in the park and watched the Hudson
Wearing her lights like golden spangles
Glinting on black satin.
The rail along the curving pathway
Was low in a happy place to let us cross,
And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom
Sheltered us,
While your kisses and the flowers,
Falling, falling,
Tangled in my hair....

The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky.

And now, far off
In the fragrant darkness
The tree is tremulous again with bloom
For June comes back.

To-night what girl
Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair
This year's blossoms, clinging to its coils?