All Poems
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The Only Daughter. Illustration of a Picture
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
They bid me strike the idle strings,
As if my summer days
Ne Te Suicide Pas, Seigneur...
© Alain Bosquet
Ne te suicide pas, Seigneur, voici quapparaît une orchidée parmi les ruines,
Ne te suicide pas, Seigneur, voici que renaît le ruisseau dans le cratère dune tombe,
Ne te suicide pas, Seigneur, le ciel a mis du givre sur sa balafre, locéan a guéri sa blessure dun bandage de corail.
A Day Like Any Other
© Lisel Mueller
Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor's desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It's not true
Dead Men Tell No Tales
© Haniel Long
They say that dead men tell no tales!
Except of barges with red sails
And sailors mad for nightingales;
Another Version
© Lisel Mueller
Our trees are aspens, but people
mistake them for birches;
they think of us as characters
in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin
Wishing
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Do you wish the world were better?
Let me tell you what to do.
Set a watch upon your actions,
Keep them always straight and true.
What The Dog Perhaps Hears
© Lisel Mueller
If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
There Will Come Soft Rains
© Sara Teasdale
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
Immortality
© Lisel Mueller
In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
The Path Through The Snow
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
BARE and sunshiny, bright and bleak,
Rounded cold as a dead maid's cheek,
Folded white as a sinner's shroud,
Or wandering angel's robes of cloud.--
Well I know, well I know
Over the fields the path through the snow.
Blood Oranges
© Lisel Mueller
In 1936, a child
in Hitler's Germany,
what did I know about the war in Spain?
Andalusia was a tango
Alive Together
© Lisel Mueller
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
The Temple Tank
© Govinda Krishna Chettur
Here, by this pool, where herons stand and wait,
In quietness I cannot imitate:
Night Song
© Lisel Mueller
Among rocks, I am the loose one,
among aarows, I am the heart,
among daughters, I am the recluse,
among sons, the one who dies young.
Things
© Lisel Mueller
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
I Know Who
© William Barnes
Aye, aye, vull rathe the zun mus' rise
To meäke us tired o' zunny skies,
For A Thirteenth Birthday
© Lisel Mueller
You have read War and Peace.
Now here is Sister Carrie,
not up to Tolstoy; still
it will second the real world:
Why We Tell Stories
© Lisel Mueller
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
