I had never heard of Opal Whiteley before today. With my newly found interest in verses, I may be reading her more often. Here’s a poem I found to go with the swirlings inside my head:
The Little Room
In Man’s heart is a little room.
He has named it
Oblivion
And things are arranged along its wall
That he does not wish
To think about.
Every time he pushes something in there
He closes the door very tightly.
But in hours when he is weary,
In the hours that walk around some midnights
When high fires have burned
To a low flicker
Then the little door swings on its hinges.
And no thing
Will make it stay closed
All of the time.
When he is near death
All the Velvet-footed Wanderers in there
Join the throng around his bed,
“We will not die,” they whisper
To one another.
While Beauty waits with drawn lips,
And dry eyes.
But, there is heard
The patter of a little sad rain
In her heart’s garden
Where some little flower buds
That were once thinking of the sun
Will never open
Because man keeps a little room
Of oblivion in his soul.
Opal Whiteley is an amazing writer and a fascinating person. I do the semi-official website on her from Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She visited Udaipur (sp) from about 1925-1927 and wrote a long article of her travels in the “Kingdom of the Sun”. We were doing a search today for names of OW’s poems and found your blog.
best wishes,
Steve Williamson
Thank you for dropping by. I had never been particularly fond of poetry, however thats on a reversal now after I started reading through the poems of Rabindranath Tagore. Hence ocassionally, when I do come across verses that I like, I try to write then down here along with the source so that I can keep coming back to them and explore more. Thank you for sharing your website’s link, am bookmarking it. 🙂