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Love Song

Sweep the house clean,
hang fresh curtains
in the windows
put on a new dress
and come with me!
The elm is scattering
its little loaves
of sweet smells
from a white sky!

Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.

— William Carlos Williams, Love Song
A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere! (1917), 35.

(William Carlos Williams wrote a whole bunch of poems around 1916-1917 entitled Love Song — there’s another one in the same book even, and the one published by Poetry in November 1916, which is linked from the Audio Poem of the Day page as the supposed text of the poem in the reading, is another, different poem from the one that was read. So it actually took me a minute to hunt down a good copy of the text for this after I heard it in audio form. This one appeared in A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere! (1917), after the poem Summer Song and before Foreign.)