All Poems
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For a' That and a' That
© Robert Burns
Is there, for honest poverty,
That hings his head, an' a' that?
The Past
© Henry Timrod
To-days most trivial act may hold the seed
Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;
Oh, cherish always every word and deed!
The simplest record of thyself hath worth.
Wyatt Resteth Here
© Henry Howard
Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest;
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain,
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast;
Such profit he of envy could obtain.
In Time
© William Stanley Merwin
The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
In Beauty Bright
© Gerald Stern
In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s
lily and though an angel he looked absurd
She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways
© André Breton
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
The Operation
© Anne Sexton
Clean of the body’s hair,
I lie smooth from breast to leg.
All that was special, all that was rare
is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
To Ben Jonson
© Thomas Carew
'Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand
Hath fix'd upon the sotted age a brand
When the World as We Knew It Ended
© Joy Harjo
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
To a Reason
© Arthur Rimbaud
A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.
You look away: the new love!
You look back,—the new love!
Amoretti LXII: "The weary yeare his race now having run"
© Edmund Spenser
The weary yeare his race now having run,
The new begins his compast course anew:
What Became
© Wesley McNair
What became of any afternoon
that was so vivid you forgot
the present was up to its old
trick of pretending
it would be there
always?
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
© André Breton
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
After Tonight
© Gary Soto
You expect your daughter
To be at the door any moment
And your husband to arrive
With the night
That is suddenly all around.
You expect the stove to burst
The Woodspurge
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walk'd on at the wind's will,
I sat now, for the wind was still.
Very Strong February
© Bernadette Mayer
A man and a woman pretend to be white ice
Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze
© Cornelius Eady
And mothers letting their babies
Be held by strangers.
And the bus drivers
Taping over their fare boxes
And willing to give directions.
