Aren’t there bigger things to talk about
Than a window in Greenwich Village
And hyacinths sprouting
Like little puce poems out of a sick soul?
Some cosmic hearsay–
As to whom–it can’t be Mars! put the moon–that way….
Or what winds do to canyons
Under the tall stars…
Or even
How that old roué, Neptune,
Cranes over his bald-head moons
At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.
“Scandal” was published in Lola Ridge’s second volume, Sun-up: And Other Poems (B. W. Huebsch, 1920), a collection of free-verse imagist poems.
Lola Ridge was born in Dublin in 1873 and immigrated to the United States in 1907. A poet and activist, Ridge was an early advocate for women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of immigrants. Ridge published five volumes of poetry before her death in 1941.
