All Poems
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On the Departure of the Nightingale
© Charlotte Turner Smith
Sweet poet of the woods, a long adieu!
Farewell soft mistrel of the early year!
Invocation
© Denise Levertov
Silent, about-to-be-parted-from house.
Wood creaking, trying to sigh, impatient.
Clicking of squirrel-teeth in the attic.
Denuded beds, couches stripped of serapes.
The Princess: Tears, Idle Tears
© Alfred Tennyson
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Oft, in the Stilly Night (Scotch Air)
© Thomas Moore
Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumbers chain has bound me,
In Death Valley
© Edwin Markham
There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,
Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill
Playthings
© Anselm Hollo
Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all the morning.
I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig.
A Winter Song
© Jean Ingelow
Came the dread Archer up yonder lawn —
Night is the time for the old to die —
But woe for an arrow that smote the fawn,
When the hind that was sick unscathed went by.
Confluence
© Yusef Komunyakaa
I’ve been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
The Common Women Poems, II. Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80
© Judy Grahn
She’s a copperheaded waitress,
tired and sharp-worded, she hides
Small Kingdom
© Samuel Menashe
In their doorways women sit sewing
By the good light of afternoon
And nothing is beyond knowing
Though the sun shall go down soon
The Flurry
© Sharon Olds
When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
The Haunted Oak
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
(I asked of Destiny...)
© Anselm Hollo
I asked of Destiny, Tell me who with relentless hand pushes me on?
Destiny told me to look behind.
I turned and saw my own self behind pushing forward the self in front.
Buddhist New Year Song
© Diane di Prima
I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves
seated in front of a fireplace, our house
made somehow more gracious, and you said
“There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I
brought down with me
Neutrality Loathsome
© Robert Herrick
God will have all, or none; serve Him, or fall
Down before Baal, Bel, or Belial:
Either be hot, or cold: God doth despise,
Abhorre, and spew out all Neutralities.
Normalization
© Czeslaw Milosz
They had a saying then: “Even monsters
have their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’
flaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn.
Prodigy
© Charles Simic
It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.
