All Poems

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There is a strain to read among the hills,
The old and full of voices by the source
Of some free stream, whose gladdening presence fills
The solitude with sound; for in its course
Even such is thy deep song, that seems a part
Of those high scences, a fountain from the heart.

Crossing 16

© Anselm Hollo

You came to my door in the dawn and sang; it angered me to be awakened from sleep, and you went away unheeded.
You came in the noon and asked for water; it vexed me in my work, and you were sent away with reproaches.
You came in the evening with your flaming torches.
You seemed to me like a terror and I shut my door.
Now in the midnight I sit alone in my lampless room and call you back whom I turned away in insult.

Romance

© Ruth Stone

I went back, as to my relatives.

When I arrived, the elms had been shaved.

Sonnets from the Portuguese 22: When our Two Souls

© Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

A Roundelay between Two Shepherds

© Michael Drayton

1 Shep. Tell me, thou gentle shepherd swain,
Whos yonder in the vale is set?
2 Shep. Oh, it is she, whose sweets do stain
The lily, rose, the violet!

After Disappointment

© Mark Jarman

To lie in your child’s bed when she is gone

Is calming as anything I know. To fall

Desdichada

© Katha Pollitt

I.

For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge

Ceremony

© Lola Ridge

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille
Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs
Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.
But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all allows,
How much we are the woods we wander in.

For We Are Thy People

© Pierre Reverdy

For we are thy people, and thou art our God;

We are thy children and thou our father.

Waking from Sleep

© Robert Bly

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

Nina's Blues

© Cornelius Eady

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

Cityscape

© Eavan Boland

I have a word for it —
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city —
which is elver.

Nocturnal

© Stephen Edgar

It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then,

The words like distant stars that faintly grace

On English Monsieur

© Benjamin Jonson

Would you believe, when you this monsieur see,

That his whole body should speak French, not he?

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

Affairs

Dawn on the black hill, and up on the roof

cats drowsing. Last night, there was a boy

When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

Nancy Jane

A dark little country store full of gravedigger’s
children buying candy.
(That’s how we looked that night.)

Associations with a View from the House

© Carl Rakosi

What can be compared to

the living eye?

Eating the Pig

© Donald Hall

Then a young woman cuts off his head.
It comes off so easily, like a detachable part.
With sudden enthusiasm we dismantle the pig,
we wrench his trotters off, we twist them
at shoulder and hip, and they come off so easily.
Then we cut open his belly and pull the skin back.