All Poems
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The Paphian Venus
© Madison Julius Cawein
With anxious eyes and dry, expectant lips,
Within the sculptured stoa by the sea,
All day she waited while, like ghostly ships,
Long clouds rolled over Paphos: the wild bee
Hung in the sultry poppy, half asleep,
Beside the shepherd and his drowsy sheep.
Another Feeling by Ruth Stone: American Life in Poetry #4 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we've made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we empathize with the intense regret of being unable to take that decision back, or any other decision, for that matter.
Another Feeling
Before The Squall
© Arthur Symons
The wind is rising on the sea,
The windy white foam-dancers leap;
And the sea moans uneasily,
And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.
The Two Coffins
© Eugene Field
In yonder old cathedral
Two lovely coffins lie;
In one, the head of the state lies dead,
And a singer sleeps hard by.
Sleep on horseback
© Matsuo Basho
Sleep on horseback,
The far moon in a continuing dream,
Steam of roasting tea.
The Hermit Thrush
© Henry Van Dyke
O wonderful! How liquid clear
The molten gold of that ethereal tone,
The Young Rat And His Dam, The Cock And The Cat
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
I paus'd a while, to meditate a Speech,
And now was stepping just within his reach;
When that rude Clown began his hect'ring Cry,
And made me for my Life, and from th' Attempt to fly.
Indeed 'twas Time, the shiv'ring Beldam said,
To scour the Plain, and be of Life afraid.
"Hedge, that divides the lovely"
© Torquato Tasso
Hedge, that divides the lovely
Garden, and myself from me,
Lancan vei per mei la landa
© Bernard de Ventadorn
Si.l reis engles e.l ducs normans
o vol, eu la veira abans
que l'iverns nos sobreprenda.
The Love Song of Har Dyal
© Rudyard Kipling
Alone upon the housetops to the North
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky-
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die.
Deer Hunt
© Judson Jerome
I flinched at every lonely rifle crack,
my knuckles whitening where I gripped the edge
of age and clung, like retching, sinking back
then gripping once again the monstrous gun,
since I, to be a man, had taken one.
Short Ode
© Stephen Vincent Benet
It is time to speak of these
Who took the long, strange journey overseas,
Upon The Lark and The Fowler
© John Bunyan
Thou simple bird, what makes thou here to play?
Look, there's the fowler, pr'ythee come away.
A Reply To A Pessimist
© Alfred Austin
O beautiful bright world! for ever young,
And now with Wisdom grafted on thy Spring,
Britain, France, America
© Henry Van Dyke
The rough expanse of democratic sea
Which parts the lands that live by liberty
Wedding Night
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Far from the feasting, in the bedroom
Sits loyal Amor and quakes with dread:
My Trust
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A picture memory brings to me
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother's knee.
