We Have Not Long To Love

By Tennessee Williams 1911–1983 Tennessee Williams
We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day....


Source: Poetry (February 1991).

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This poem originally appeared in the February 1991 issue of Poetry magazine

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February 1991
 Tennessee  Williams

Biography

The production of his first two Broadway plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, secured Tennessee Williams's place, along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, as one of America's major playwrights of the twentieth century. Critics, playgoers, and fellow dramatists recognized in Williams a poetic innovator who, refusing to be confined in what Stark Young in the New Republic called "the usual sterilities of our . . .

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Living, Time & Brevity, Relationships

POET’S REGION U.S., Southern

Poetic Terms Rhymed Stanza

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