All Poems
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The Horrid Voice of Science
© Roald Dahl
"There's machinery in the butterfly;
There's a mainspring to the bee;
There's hydraulics to a daisy,
And contraptions to a tree.
John Brown: A Paradox
© Louise Imogen Guiney
Compassionate eyes had our brave John Brown,
And a craggy stern forehead, a militant frown;
He, the storm-bow of peace. Give him volley on volley,
The fool who redeemed us once of our folly,
And the smiter that healed us, our right John Brown!
Eve of St. Agony or The Middleclass Was Sitting on Its Fat
© Kenneth Patchen
Ghosts in packs like dogs grinning at ghosts
Pocketless thieves in a city that never sleeps
Chains clank, warders curse, this world is stark mad
from The Lady of the Lake: The Western Waves of Ebbing Day
© Sir Walter Scott
The western waves of ebbing day
Rolled o’er the glen their level way;
Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet
© Lord Byron
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
At the Movie: Virginia, 1956
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
This is how it was:
they had their own churches, their own schools,
The Lover: A Ballad
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
At length, by so much importunity press'd,
Take, C, at once, the inside of my breast;
The Secret Garden
© Rita Dove
I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers,
when you came with white rabbits in your arms;
and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers,
and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone . . .
My Lifes Delight
© Thomas Campion
Come, O come, my lifes delight,
Let me not in languor pine!
Love loves no delay; thy sight,
The more enjoyed, the more divine:
O come, and take from me
The pain of being deprived of thee!
The Swamp Angel
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Is this the proud City? the scorner
Which never would yield the ground?
Which mocked at the coal-black Angel?
The cup of despair goes round.
Philosophia Perennis
© Anne Waldman
I turned: quivering yellow stars in blackness
I wept: how speech may save a woman
The picture changes & promises the heroine
That nighttime & meditation are a mirage
A Marriage Poem
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
What does it mean when a woman says,
“my husband,”
if she sits all day in the tub;
if she worries her life like a dog a rat;
if her husband seems familiar but abstract,
a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use.
Arise, Go Down
© Li-Young Lee
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;
Of the Poet’s Youth
© Erin Belieu
When the man behind the counter said, “You pay
by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?
[under the evening moon]
© Kobayashi Issa
Under the evening moon
the snail
is stripped to the waist.
Vagabonds
© Arthur Rimbaud
Pitiful brother—the dreadful nights I owed him! "I've got no real involvement in the business. I toyed with his weakness, so—it was my fault—we wound up back in exile and enslavement."
He saw me as a loser, a weird child; he added his own prods.
I answered my satanic doctor, jeering, and made it out the window. All down a landscape crossed by unheard-of music, I spun my dreams of a nighttime wealth to come.
After that more or less healthy pastime, I'd stretch out on a pallet. And almost every night, soon as I slept, my poor brother would rise—dry mouth and bulging eyes (the way he'd dreamt himself!)—and haul me into the room, howling his stupid dream.
