All Poems
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Long time a child, and still a child, when years
© Victor Segalen
Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,
Lenten Song
© Phillis Levin
That the dead are real to us
Cannot be denied,
That the living are more real
Amoretti LXVI: "To all those happy blessings which ye have"
© Edmund Spenser
To all those happy blessings which ye have,
With plenteous hand by heaven upon you thrown:
Mi Estas Vedada Tu
© Ramon Lopez Velarde
Imaginas acaso la amargura
Que hay en no convivir
Los episodios de tu vida pura?
Writing in the Afterlife
© Billy Collins
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.
Study in Orange and White
© Billy Collins
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
of the French Impressionists.
The Clote (Water-Lily)
© William Barnes
O zummer clote! when the brook’s a-glidèn
So slow an’ smooth down his zedgy bed,
The Garden Buddha by Peter Pereira: American Life in Poetry #132 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Children at play give personalities to lifeless objects, and we don't need to give up that pleasure as we grow older. Poets are good at discerning life within what otherwise might seem lifeless. Here the poet Peter Pereira, a family physician in the Seattle area, contemplates a smiling statue, and in that moment of contemplation the smile is given by the statue to the man.
The Garden Buddha
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distanceâalways
On the Metro
© C. K. Williams
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
Before A Painting By Ayvasovsky
© Hovhannes Toumanian
Rising from ocean, billows uncontrolled,
With heavy flux and reflux, beating high,
Towered up like mountains, roaring terribly;
The wild storm blew with wind gusts manifold
A mad, tempestuous race
Through endless, boundless space.
Number Man
© Carl Sandburg
He balanced fives against tens
and made them sleep together
and love each other.
Despairing Cries
© Walt Whitman
DESPAIRING cries float ceaselessly toward me, day and night,
The sad voice of Death-the call of my nearest lover, putting forth,
alarmed, uncertain,
This sea I am quickly to sail, come tell me,
Come tell me where I am speeding-tell me my destination.
Sappho
© James Wright
The twilight falls; I soften the dusting feathers,
And clean again.
The house has lain and moldered for three days.
The windows smeared with rain, the curtains torn,
The mice come in,
The kitchen blown with cold.
Alicante Lullaby
© Sylvia Plath
In Alicante they bowl the barrels
Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles
Effort at Speech Between Two People
© Katha Pollitt
: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.
Quiet Dead!
© George MacDonald
Quiet, quiet dead,
Have ye aught to say
From your hidden bed
In the earthy clay?
