Animal poems
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Prison Song
© Alan Dugan
The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water,
rearing to escape me. Where could it find another
Nightmare For Future Reference
© Stephen Vincent Benet
"Not like this," he said. "I can show you the curve.
It looks like the side of a mountain, going down.
And faster, the last three months yes, a good deal faster.
I showed it to Lobenheim and he was puzzled.
It makes a neat problem yes?" He looked at me.
Years
© Sylvia Plath
They enter as animals from the outer
Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.
The Princess (part 7)
© Alfred Tennyson
'If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream,
I would but ask you to fulfil yourself:
But if you be that Ida whom I knew,
I ask you nothing: only, if a dream,
Sweet dream, be perfect. I shall die tonight.
Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.'
Tale
© Arthur Rimbaud
The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other probably in essential health.
How could they have helped dying of it?
Together then they died.
But this Prince died in his palace at an ordinary age,
the Prince was the Genie, the Genie was the Prince.--
There is no sovereign music for our desire.
Solomon on the Vanity of the World, A Poem. In Three Books. - Knowledge. Book I.
© Matthew Prior
But, O! ere yet original man was made,
Ere the foundations of this earth were laid,
It was opponent to our search ordain'd,
That joy still sought should never be attain'd:
This sad experience cites me to reveal,
And what I dictate is from what I feel.
The Rustic Life.
© Robert Crawford
Happy are ye who can put by the stress
Of so much of the trouble worldlings know;
Ye who seem almost creatures of the woods,
Now animal and now bird-like amid
Melpomene
© Peter Huchel
The forest bitter, spiky,
no shore breeze, no foothills,
the grass grows matted, death will come
with horses' hooves, endlessly
O Soldado Espanhol
© Antônio Gonçalves Dias
O céu era azul, tão meigo e tão brando,
E a terra era a noiva que bem se arreava
Que a mente exultava, mais longe escutando
O mar a quebrar-se na praia arenosa.
The Animals are Leaving by Charles Harper Webb: American Life in Poetry #203 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet L
© Ted Kooser
To read in the news that a platoon of soldiers has been killed is a terrible thing, but to learn the name of just one of them makes the news even more vivid and sad. To hold the name of someone or something on our lips is a powerful thing. It is the badge of individuality and separateness. Charles Harper Webb, a California poet, takes advantage of the power of naming in this poem about the steady extinction of animal species.
The Animals are Leaving
One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.
Climbing West Of Lotus Flower Peak
© Li Po
Amongst the grandeur of Hua Shan
I climb to the Flower Peak,
and fancy I see fairies and immortals
carrying lotus in their
Nomenclature
© Stephen Vincent Benet
Some people have names like pitchforks, some people have names like cakes,
Names full of sizzling esses like a family quarrel of snakes,
Names black as a cat, vermilion as the cockscomb-hat of a fool
But your name is a green, small garden, a rush asleep in a pool.
From A Full Moon In March
© William Butler Yeats
PARNELL'S FUNERAL
UNDER the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.
Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War
© Margaret Atwood
Maybe there's something in all of this
I missed. But if it's selfless
love you're looking for,
you've got the wrong goddess.
History of the Twentieth Century (A Roadshow)
© Joseph Brodsky
Ladies and gentlemen and the day!
All ye made of sweet human clay!
Let me tell you: you are o'kay.
Bored
© Margaret Atwood
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
American Feuillage
© Walt Whitman
Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you also
be eligible as I am?
How can I but, as here, chanting, invite you for yourself to collect
bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of These States?
