found from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
She caught green flowers for him
would tell him stories
under the fern tree, but he only frowned
and said the world was wicked—
the yellow grass, the city, the people
who chattered and laughed.
She said people fascinated her—the quiet stranger
on the bus, the man dead in the river—
they were all something
nice and odd. And suddenly
he saw her perfectly. He knew her. He felt her.
She was like the man killing himself
in the middle of the street.
She was happy.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
