I shall walk down the road;
I shall turn and feel upon my feet
The kisses of Death, like scented rain.
For Death is a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his voice like jewels
Dropped into a satin bag,
How he has tip-toed after me down the road,
His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.
Then he will graze me with his hands,
And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds
Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on.
_Edwin Curran_
Edwin Curran was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 10, 1892, and was
educated at St. Thomas’ School in the city of his birth. After
working as an unskilled laborer in various trades, he learned
telegraphy in 1914 and has been employed ever since as an operator
for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
In 1917 he printed a little paper-bound pamphlet of thirty pages
(_First Poems_) with this naïve note: “Price of this book is 35
cents postpaid. Author is 25, unmarried, a beginner and needs
publisher. If this volume meets expenses, another, possibly better,
will be issued.” Expecting to find poetry of an absurd simplicity,
one is startled to find striking images, strange pictures and (in
such poems as “Soldier’s Epitaph” and “Sailing of Columbus”) lines
like: