All Poems
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Butchers
© C. K. Williams
1
Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
The Ragpickers' Wine
© Charles Baudelaire
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,
Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,
As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,
Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,
from Mercian Hymns
© Geoffrey Hill
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany
© Carl Sandburg
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind,
remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
pantoum: landing, 1976
© Evie Shockley
dreaming the lives of the ancestors,
you awake, justly terrified of this world:
The Evening Wind
© William Cullen Bryant
Spirit that breathest through my lattice, thou
That coolst the twilight of the sultry day,
Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows
© William Shakespeare
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
from War is Kind [“I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night”]
© Stephen Crane
I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night
The sweep of each sad lost wave
The dwindling boom of the steel thing's striving
The little cry of a man to a man
A shadow falling across the greyer night
And the sinking of the small star.
Early in the Morning
© Li-Young Lee
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
In the Loop
© Richard Jones
I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
If I Were Another
© Mahmoud Darwish
If I were another on the road, I would have said
to the guitar: Teach me an extra string!
Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier—
that’s what my new song would say. Whenever
the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two
on this road: I ... and another!
To the Light of September
© William Stanley Merwin
When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not
