Poetry Revisited: Beware by Dora Sigerson Shorter

Beware

(from The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems: 1897)

I closed my hands upon a moth
And when I drew my palms apart,
Instead of dusty, broken wings
I found a bleeding human heart.

I crushed my foot upon a worm
That had my garden for its goal,
But when I drew my foot aside
I found a dying human soul.

Dora Sigerson Shorter
(1866-1918)