All Poems
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Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
© Robert Hayden
Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her,
four bullets hushed her.
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?
A Dirge
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoos calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.
Peripheries
© Ruth Stone
This circle holding the afternoon sky is a lake
For summer business measured in stacked pairs
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 44
© Alfred Tennyson
How fares it with the happy dead?
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
Service
© Trumbull Stickney
Chide me not, darling, that I sing
Familiar thoughts and metres old:
Nay, do not scold
My spirit’s childish uttering.
To the Muse
© James Wright
I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you
What you know:
The Poster Girl’s Defence
© Carolyn Wells
It was an Artless Poster Girl pinned up against my wall,
She was tremendous ugly, she was exceeding tall;
I was gazing at her idly, and I think I must have slept,
For that poster maiden lifted up her poster voice, and wept.
Power
© Elizabeth Daryush
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
In Love with You
© Kenneth Koch
We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider
Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.
I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love
I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.
[The Doleful Lay of Clorinda]
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain,
That may compassion my impatient grief?
In the bleak midwinter
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
Sonnet XXXII: If thou Survive my Well-contented Day
© William Shakespeare
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
Daddy Longlegs
© Ted Kooser
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
When Thou Must Home to Shades of Underground
© Thomas Campion
When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv'd, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish'd love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;
Tho Lack of Laurels and of Wreaths Not One
© Trumbull Stickney
Tho lack of laurels and of wreaths not one
Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet
The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas (July, 1861)
© Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
All they feel is this: ’tis glory,
A rapture sharp, though transitory,
Yet lasting in belaureled story.
So they gayly go to fight,
Chatting left and laughing right.
