Afternoon on a Hill

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

 I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

 

I will look at cliffs and clouds
    With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
    And the grass rise.

 

And when lights begin to show
    Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
    And then start down!

(I have stood on this hill in Camden, Maine, 

looked down, and thought of this poem.  Lovely.)

Poem now in the public domain.

Reminder

I am rich I am poor. Time is all I own. I spend or hoard it for experience. By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known. Thrift is a venomous error, then, a stone named bread or cash to support the pretense that I’m rich. I am poor; time is all I own... though I hold to memory: how spent time shone as you approached, and the light loomed immense. By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known, though scars fade. I have memory on loan while it evaporates; though it be dense & I am rich, I am poor. Time is all I own to sustain me—the moonlit skeleton that holds my whole life in moving suspense. By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known. Ownership’s brief, random, a suite of events. If the past is long the future ’s short. Since I am rich I am poor. Time is all I own. By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known. Marie Ponsot, Collected Poems, Knopf