All Poems
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The Passions that we Fought with and Subdued
© Trumbull Stickney
The passions that we fought with and subdued
Never quite die. In some maimed serpent’s coil
They lurk, ready to spring and vindicate
That power was once our torture and our lord.
Bright Leaf
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
A Little Language
© Robert Duncan
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
The Peacock at Alderton
© Geoffrey Hill
Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
Morningside Heights, July
© William Matthews
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"
© Walt Whitman
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travelld a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once lookd on you,
For I feard I might afterward lose you.
Marshlands
© Emily Pauline Johnson
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
(I found a few old letters...)
© Anselm Hollo
XIV
I found a few old letters of mine carefully hidden in thy boxa few small toys for thy memory to play with. With a timorous heart thou didst try to steal these trifles from the turbulent stream of time which washes away planets and stars, and didst say, These are only mine! Alas, there is no one now who can claim themwho is able to pay their price; yet they are still here. Is there no love in this world to rescue thee from utter loss, even like this love of thine that saved these letters with such fond care?
O woman, thou camest for a moment to my side and touched me with the great mystery of the woman that there is in the heart of creationshe who ever gives back to God his own outflow of sweetness; who is the eternal love and beauty and youth; who dances in bubbling streams and sings in the morning light; who with heaving waves suckles the thirsty earth and whose mercy melts in rain; in whom the eternal one breaks in two in joy that can contain itself no more and overflows in the pain of love.
from Second Book of Odes: 6. What the Chairman Told Tom
© Ted Hughes
Poetry? It’s a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
Tender Only to One
© Stevie Smith
Tender only to one
Tender and true
The petals swing
To my fingering
Is it you, or you, or you?
Ars Poetica?
© Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
The Gardener 85
© Anselm Hollo
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
The Herdsman
© Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
I'm herdsman of a flock.
The sheep are my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And my hands and feet
And nostrils and mouth.
The Bamboo Ladder
© Pierre Reverdy
There once was a bamboo ladder.
It reached up to the sky.
And the Japanese man
Did tricks on the ladder
And said what a good man am I.
Clotilde
© Guillaume Apollinaire
Anemone and columbine
Where gloom has lain
Opened in gardens
Between love and disdain
Thinking of Madame Bovary
© Jane Kenyon
The first hot April day the granite step
was warm. Flies droned in the grass.
When a car went past they rose
in unison, then dropped back down. . . .
