Thoughts of the Past to Ponder
Compiled by Melinda Rucker Haynes

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before--
How long ago I may not know;
But just when at the swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall, --I knew it all of yore.
        ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

So long ago! And yet I'm still the same Margaret.
It's only our lives that grow old. We are where
Centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand
Lives our eyes begin to open.
        ~ Eugene O'Neill

Oh ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was King in Babylon
And you were a Christian Slave.
I saw, I took, I cast you by,
I bent and broke your pride . . .
And a myriad suns have set and shone
Since then upon the grave
Decreed by the King in Babylon
To her that had been his Slave.
The pride I trampled is now my scathe,
For it tramples me again.
The old resentment lasts like death,
For you love, yet you refrain.
I break my heart on your hard unfaith,
And I break my heart in vain.
        ~ William Ernest Henley