All Poems
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Sloth
© Yusef Komunyakaa
If you're one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren't worth a bullet,
Poor Angels
© Edward Hirsch
At this hour the soul floats weightlessly
through the city streets, speechless and invisible,
astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds
seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones
The Epitaph in Form of a Ballad which Villon Made for Himself and his Comrades, Expecting to be Hanged along with Them
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Prince Jesus, that of all art lord and head,
Keep us, that hell be not our bitter bed;
We have nought to do in such a master's hall.
Be not ye therefore of our fellowhead,
But pray to God that he forgive us all.
Ulysses
© Alfred Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Jewel Box
© Eamon Grennan
Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
The Higher Pantheism
© Alfred Tennyson
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,-
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
Clothes
© Edgar Bowers
Walking back to the office after lunch,
I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,”
reading
© Joanne Burns
there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.
if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read
Mariana in the South
© Alfred Tennyson
With one black shadow at its feet,
The house thro' all the level shines,
(Sing the song of the moment...)
© Anselm Hollo
Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day;
Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back;
Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret.
Weave not in memorys thread the days that would glide into nights.
To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps.
Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs.
fire
© Nick Flynn
face, I don’t remember his
name, one night
he’s walking home from a party, a car it
Poverty
© Jane Taylor
I saw an old cottage of clay,
And only of mud was the floor;
It was all falling into decay,
And the snow drifted in at the door.
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Dreamwood
© Adrienne Rich
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
Ballade of Modest Confession
© Hilaire Belloc
Envoi
Prince! do not let your Nose, your royal Nose,
Your large imperial Nose get out of Joint.
For though you cannot touch my golden Prose,
Painting on Vellum is my weakest point.
Near Helikon
© Trumbull Stickney
By such an all-embalming summer day
As sweetens now among the mountain pines
