All Poems

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University

© Ishmael Reed

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew

Is the curriculum. In mid-September

Nor past, nor future cloud thy brow,
Thy range of thought confin'd to now;
Calm on a mother's breast you lie,
And heed not if, with tearful eye,
For thee her wishes fondly stray
O'er many a New-Year's Day.

Dover Beach

© Matthew Arnold

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The "William P. Frye"

© Jeanne Robert Foster

I saw her first abreast the Boston Light
At anchor; she had just come in, turned head,
And sent her hawsers creaking, clattering down.
I was so near to where the hawse-pipes fed

The Scamps

© Henry Lawson

Of home, name and wealth and ambition bereft

We are children of fortune and luck:

The Wild Geese

© Dora Sigerson Shorter

"Wild geese are very numerous in this district, especially around Lough Esknahinny." Cork Examiner, December , .

I walked by Esknahinny at the waning of the moon,

This Hour and What Is Dead

© Li-Young Lee

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

How wonderful

© Saigyo

How wonderful, that
Her heart
Should show me kindness;
And of all the numberless folk,
Grief should not touch me.

Dulcis Memoria

© Henry Van Dyke

Long, long ago I heard a little song,

(Ah, was it long ago, or yesterday?)

The Swallow

© Anacreon

Foolish prater, what dost thou

So early at my window do,

Der Schwoerende Liebhaber

© Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Ich schwoer es dir, o Laura, dich zu hassen;
Gerechten Hass schwoer ich dir zu.
Ich schwoer es allen Schoenen, sie zu hassen;
Weil alle treulos sind, wie du.
Ich schwoer es dir, vor Amors Ohren,
Dass ich--ach! dass ich falsch geschworen.

With Antecedents

© Walt Whitman

I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews;
I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god;
I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without
exception;

Billet-Doux

© Georg Trakl

For S. S.
She reads by the light of a guttering candle
and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge
as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying

Peacock Display by David Wagoner: American Life in Poetry #11 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20

© Ted Kooser

Here David Wagoner, a distinguished poet living in Washington state, vividly describes a peacock courtship, and though it's a poem about birds, haven't you seen the males of other species, including ours, look every bit as puffed up, and observed the females' hilarious indifference? Peacock Display

He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune,
Perfectly cocksure, and suddenly spreads
The huge fan of his tail for her amazement.

Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire

My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:

How comes it then that this her cold so great

The air is drenched with day, but one by one

The flowers close on cue,

Die Schwalbenhode

1.

weh unser guter kaspar ist tot

© Jon Anderson

She came home running
back to the mothering blackness
deep in the smothering blackness
white tears icicle gold plains of her face
She came home running