All Poems
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Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
© Seamus Justin Heaney
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
Tintype on the Pond, 1925 by J. Lorraine Brown: American Life in Poetry #35 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet La
© Ted Kooser
Massachusetts poet J. Lorraine Brown has used an unusual image in “Tintype on the Pond, 1925.” This poem, like many others, offers us a unique experience, presented as a gift, for us to respond to as we will. We need not ferret out a hidden message. How many of us will recall this little scene the next time we see ice skates or a Sunday-dinner roast?
Testimony
© Seamus Justin Heaney
'We were killing pigs when the
Yanks arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight
and gutter-blood
To Them That Mourn
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Lift up your heads: in life, in death,
God knoweth his head was high.
Quit we the coward's broken breath
Who watched a strong man die.
The Otter
© Seamus Justin Heaney
When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.
Cats
© Francis Scarfe
Those who love cats which do not even purr
Or which are thin and tired and very old,
Bend down to them in the street and stroke their fur
And rub their ears, and smooth their breast, and hold
Them carefully, and gaze into their eyes of gold.
From The Frontier Of Writing
© Seamus Justin Heaney
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
Elegy
© Allen Tate
No more the white refulgent streets.
Never the dry hollows of the mind
Shall he in fine courtesy walk
Again, for death is not unkind.
Keeping Going
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.
But separately. The women after dark,
Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,
The only time the soul was let alone,
The only time that face and body calmed
In the eye of heaven.
Autumn Song
© Dante Alighieri
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
Postscript
© Seamus Justin Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
To O.E.A.
© Claude McKay
Your voice is the color of a robin's breast,
And there's a sweet sob in it like rain-still rain in the night.
Casualty
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
Bogland
© Seamus Justin Heaney
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Anahorish
© Seamus Justin Heaney
My "place of clear water,"
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
The Russet-Backed Thrush
© Herbert Bashford
He dwells where pine and hemlock grow,
A merry minstrel seldom seen;
The voice of Joy is his I know
Shy poet of the Evergreen!
Twice Shy
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.
A Parable From Liebig
© Charles Kingsley
The church bells were ringing, the devil sat singing
On the stump of a rotting old tree;
'Oh faith it grows cold, and the creeds they grow old,
And the world is nigh ready for me.'
The Perch
© Seamus Justin Heaney
That is passable through, but theyre bluntly holding the
pass,
Under the water-roof, over the bottom, adoze
General John
© William Schwenck Gilbert
The bravest names for fire and flames
And all that mortal durst,
Were GENERAL JOHN and PRIVATE JAMES,
Of the Sixty-seventy-first.
