All Poems
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Faith by Judy Loest : American Life in Poetry #216 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Judy Loest lives in Knoxville and, like many fine Appalachian writers, her poems have a welcoming conversational style, rooted in that region's storytelling tradition. How gracefully she sweeps us into the landscape and the scene!
Faith
Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass,
Absence
© Paul Eluard
I speak to you over cities
I speak to you over plains
My mouth is against your ear
The two sides of the walls face
Birdsong
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Birdsong brings relief
to my longing
I'm just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please universal soul, practice
some song or something through me!
Plays
© Walter Savage Landor
ALAS, how soon the hours are over
Counted us out to play the lover!
And how much narrower is the stage
Allotted us to play the sage!
In The Garden VIII: Later Autumn
© Edward Dowden
THIS is the year's despair: some wind last night
Utter'd too soon the irrevocable word,
A Woodland Grave
© Madison Julius Cawein
White moons may come, white moons may go-
She sleeps where early blossoms blow;
Knows nothing of the leafy June,
That leans above her night and noon,
Crowned now with sunbeam, now with moon,
Watching her roses grow.
Verses For Pictures
© William Morris
I am Day; I bring again
Life and glory, Love and pain:
Awake, arise! from death to death
Through me the Worlds tale quickeneth.
The Ruling Thought
© Giacomo Leopardi
Most sweet, most powerful,
Controller of my inmost soul;
The terrible, yet precious gift
Of heaven, companion kind
Of all my days of misery,
O thought, that ever dost recur to me;
Sonnet To My Friend - With An Identity Disc
© Wilfred Owen
If ever I had dreamed of my dead name
High in the heart of London, unsurpassed
By Time for ever, and the Fugitive, Fame,
There seeking a long sanctuary at last, -
A Song Of Long Ago
© James Whitcomb Riley
A song of Long Ago:
Sing it lightly--sing it low--
Sing it softly--like the lisping of the lips we used to know
When our baby-laughter spilled
From the glad hearts ever filled
With music blithe as robin ever trilled!
Ode
© Mathurin Regnier
Jamais ne pourray-je bannir
Hors de moy l'ingrat souvenir
De ma gloire si tost passee?
Toujours pour nourrir mon soucy.
Amour, cet enfant sans mercy,
L'offrira-t-il a ma pensee!
Ode to Salvador Dali
© Federico Garcia Lorca
A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.
The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,
The grays watching over the last balustrades.
The Ruined Chapel
© William Allingham
By the shore, a plot of ground
Clips a ruined chapel round,
Buttressed with a grassy mound;
Where Day and Night and Day go by
And bring no touch of human sound.
Croquet
© Alice Guerin Crist
In a garden where the may made the straggling fences gay
And the roses cream and scarlet shed their petals on the breeze
Your maiden aunts and I, and you, demure and shy,
Played a sober game of croquet underneath the spreading trees.
Stand by the Engines
© Henry Lawson
ON THE moonlighted decks there are children at play,
While smoothly the steamer is holding her way;
And the old folks are chatting on deck-seats and chairs,
And the lads and the lassies go strolling in pairs.
