Animal poems
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The Sleepout
© Les Murray
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing
swelled the blind on its timber boom
The Quality Of Sprawl
© Les Murray
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
The New Hieroglyphics
© Les Murray
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
Away, Melancholy
© Stevie Smith
Are not the trees green,
The earth as green?
Does not the wind blow,
Fire leap and the rivers flow?
Away melancholy.
Two Kinds of Deliverance
© Mary Oliver
Last night the geese came back,
slanting fast
from the blossom of the rising moon down
to the black pond. A muskrat
swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried
Flare
© Mary Oliver
It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;
Wild Geese
© Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
The Sphinx
© Oscar Wilde
In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom.
February: Thinking of Flowers
© Jane Kenyon
Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.
An Alphabet of Famous Goops
© Gelett Burgess
AN ALPHABET OF FAMOUS GOOPS.
Which you 'll Regard with Yells and Whoops.
Futile Acumen!
For you Yourselves are Doubtless Dupes
Of Failings Such as Mar these Groups --
We all are Human!
The Tongues We Speak
© Patricia Goedicke
I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.
A Marriage Poem
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
What does it mean when a woman says,
“my husband,”
if she sits all day in the tub;
if she worries her life like a dog a rat;
if her husband seems familiar but abstract,
a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use.
When the World as We Knew It Ended
© Joy Harjo
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
© André Breton
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
Identity
© William Stanley Merwin
When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog
somewhere in a Germany that has
from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen]
© Luke Davies
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
My Brother, the Artist, at Seven
© Philip Levine
As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
