All Poems

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Absolution

© Edith Nesbit

He stood beside her, young and strong, and swayed
With pity for the sorrow in her eyes--
Which, as she raised them to his own, conveyed
Into his soul a sort of sad surprise--

Landscape, Dense with Trees

© Ellen Bryant Voigt

When you move away, you see how much depends

on the pace of the days—how much

The Tables Turned

© André Breton

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

© James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

The Oyster Schooner

© William Henry Drummond

For w'y dey mak' de fuss lak dat, an' nearly
broke deir neck,
Ain't dey got de noder oyster more better dan
malpecque
Or caraquette, dat leetle wan from down be-
low Kebeck?

Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers

© James Tate

We traveled down to see your house,

Tor House, Hawk Tower, in Carmel,

To A Young Man

© Edgar Albert Guest

The great were once as you.

They whom men magnify to-day

The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?
Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.
They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.
They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.”
Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are.
Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”

The Guitarist Tunes Up

© Frances Darwin Cornford

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

The Beautiful

© Roddy Lumsden

Into perplexity: as an itch chased round
an oxter or early man in the cave mouth
watching rain-drifts pour from beyond

A Lemon

© Pablo Neruda

Out of lemon flowers

loosed

Fixed Ideas

© Kenneth Slessor

Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,

Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,

The Second Coming

© William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Sonnet

© Frances Anne Kemble

SUGGESTED BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE OBSERVING THAT WE NEVER DREAM OF OURSELVES YOUNGER THAN WE ARE.

Not in our dreams, not even in our dreams

Agoraphobia

© Linda Pastan

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace,
Hooting and shrieking."
—William Shakespeare

Nightfall

O day, so sicklied o'er with night!
O dreadful fruit of fallen dusk!--
A Circe orange, golden-bright,
With horror 'neath its husk.

Dawn

The soft-toned clock upon the stair chimed three—

Too sweet for sleep, too early yet to rise.

The Storm.

I can hear the great boughs swing
Through the stormy night,
Each a dryad-haunted thing
With its dark delight,

A Life Of Crime

Frail friends, I love you all!
Maybe that's the trouble,
storm in the eye of a storm.
Everyone wants too much.
Instead we gratefully accept
some stylized despair: