All Poems
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Don't Worry if Your Job Is Small
© Pierre Reverdy
Don't worry if your job is small,
And your rewards are few.
Remember that the mighty oak,
Was once a nut like you.
Empty Space
© Amrita Pritam
There were two kingdoms only:
the first of them threw out both him and me.
The second we abandoned.
The School Where I Studied
© John Wesley
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
and said in my heart: here I learned certain things
The Green Linnet
© André Breton
Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head,
Final Autumn
© Annie Finch
Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard.
Light drives lower and one bluejay crams
our cold memories out past the sun,
Song: A youth for Jane with ardour sighed...
© Amelia Opie
A youth for Jane with ardour sighed,
The maid with sparkling eye;
But to his vows she still replied,
Ill hear you by and by.
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change
© Naomi Shihab Nye
Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.
Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 7
© Alfred Tennyson
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
Smokers of Paper
© Cesare Pavese
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner
mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.
Cleanliness
© Charles Lamb
All-endearing Cleanliness,
Virtue next to Godliness,
Easiest, cheapest, needful'st duty,
To the body health and beauty,
Who that's human would refuse it,
When a little water does it?
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 7: The Face
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
from The Task, Book I: The Sofa
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere,
