All Poems
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Dream Song 172: Your face broods
© John Berryman
Your face broods from my table, Suicide.
Your force came on like a torrent toward the end
of agony and wrath.
You were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath
and changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred
and went on round the bend
The Coin
© Sara Teasdale
INTO my heart's treasury
I slipped a coin
That time cannot take
Nor a thief purloin,
Dream Song 1: Huffy Henry hid the day
© John Berryman
Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,âa trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.
Jim the Splitter
© Henry Kendall
The bard who is singing of Wollombi Jim
Is hardly just now in the requisite trim
To sit on his Pegasus fairly;
Besides, he is bluntly informed by the Muse
That Jim is a subject no singer should choose;
For Jim is poetical rarely.
The Traveller
© John Berryman
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.I took the same train that the others took,
The Maid-Servant At The Inn
© Dorothy Parker
"It's queer," she said; "I see the light
As plain as I beheld it then,
All silver-like and calm and bright-
We've not had stars like that again!
The Ball Poem
© John Berryman
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily overthere it is in the water!
In The Hill At New Grange
© Robinson Jeffers
Great upright stones higher than the height of a man are our walls,
Huge overlapping stones are the summer clouds in our sky.
The hill of boulders is heaped over all. Each hundred years
One of the enormous stones will move an inch in the dark.
Each double century one of the oaks on the crown of the mound
Above us breaks in a wind, an oak or an ash grows.
Dream Song 14: Life, friends, is boring
© John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
The Cloud's Swan-Song
© Francis Thompson
There is a parable in the pathless cloud,
There's prophecy in heaven,--they did not lie,
The Chaldee shepherds; seal-ed from the proud,
To cheer the weighted heart that mates the seeing eye.
The Curse
© John Berryman
Cedars and the westward sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Past One OClock ...
© Vladimir Mayakovsky
Past one oclock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
Im in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
"Company Manners"
© James Whitcomb Riley
When Bess gave her Dollies a Tea, said she,--
"It's unpolite, when they's Company,
To say you've drinked _two_ cups, you see,--
But say you've drinked _a couple_ of tea."
At the Top of My voice
© Vladimir Mayakovsky
Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.
The Virgin Martyr
© Ada Cambridge
Every wild she-bird has nest and mate in the warm April weather,
But a captive woman, made for love - no mate, no nest has she.
In the spring of young desire, young men and maids are wed together,
And the happy mothers flaunt their bliss for all the world to see:
Nature's sacramental feast for these - an empty board for me.
The Ashes by Karin Gottshall: American Life in Poetry #21 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
How many of us, alone at a grave or coming upon the site of some remembered event, find ourselves speaking to a friend or loved one who has died? In this poem by Karin Gottshall the speaker addresses someone's ashes as she casts them from a bridge. I like the way the ashes take on new life as they merge with the wind.
The Ashes
You were carried here by hands
and now the wind has you, gritty
as incense, dark sparkles borne
Conversation with Comrade Lenin
© Vladimir Mayakovsky
will be done
and is already being done.
We feed and we clothe
and give light to the needy,
Rest
© Madison Julius Cawein
Under the brindled beech,
Deep in the mottled shade,
Where the rocks hang in reach
Flower and ferny blade,
Let him be laid.
