All Poems
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from Odes: 14. Gin the Goodwife Stint
© Ted Hughes
The ploughland has gone to bent
and the pasture to heather;
gin the goodwife stint,
she’ll keep the house together.
A Visit from St. Nicholas
© Clement Clarke Moore
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
© Mark Strand
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived
Somebody Trying
© Denise Levertov
‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed.
‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’
Something about his brother dying.
The Song of the Wreck
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
Rivers and Mountains
© John Ashbery
On the secret map the assassins
Cloistered, the Moon River was marked
Crows in a Strong Wind
© Cornelius Eady
Off go the crows from the roof.
The crows can’t hold on.
They might as well
Be perched on an oil slick.
White hair does not weigh
© Samuel Menashe
more than the black
which it displaces
Upon any fine day
I jump these traces
The Breather
© Billy Collins
Just as in the horror movies
when someone discovers that the phone calls
are coming from inside the house
The Mother
© Ruth Stone
Here where the rooms are dryly still
Who is this dustily asleep
While juicy children run the field?
The Opal
© Wole Soyinka
Nailing up chicken wire on the frame house,
or using a chalk line, or checking a level at a glance
Funeral Music
© Geoffrey Hill
William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483
Bereavement
© William Lisle Bowles
Whose was that gentle voice, that, whispering sweet,
Promised methought long days of bliss sincere!
[Over a cup of coffee]
© Stephen Dobyns
Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or
walking the dog, he would recall some incident
from his youthnothing significantclimbing a tree
in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's
America
© Walt Whitman
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
Mother and Child
© Louise Gluck
This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
Sapphics
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
