Animal poems
/ page 36 of 37 /
Essay on Man
© Alexander Pope
The First EpistleAwake, my ST. JOHN!(1) leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.
Let us (since Life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
A Garden In Chicago
© Karl Shapiro
A gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard,
Making me think I was a bird of prose;
For overhead, bagged in a golden cloud,
There hung the fatted souls of animals,
Wile at my eyes bright dots of butterflies
Turned off and on like distant neon signs.
Your Love And Mercy
© Gary R. Ferris
And all You created for me to see.
*****
The trees gently blow in the wind,
The Excesses Of God
© Robinson Jeffers
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
Contemplation Of The Sword
© Robinson Jeffers
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
Who In The Hell Is Tom Jones?
© Charles Bukowski
I was shacked with a
24 year old girl from
New York City for
two weeks- about
What Can We Do?
© Charles Bukowski
at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of
courage
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn't
Tz'u No. 18
© Li Ching Chao
Thin mist, dense clouds, a grief-stricken day;
auspicious incense burns in the gold animal.
Once again, it is the joyous mid-autumn festival,
but a midnight chill
touches my jade pillow and silk bed-screen.
Amateurs of Heaven
© Howard Nemerov
Two lovers to a midnight meadow came
High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand
Like effigies and look up at the stars,
The never-setting ones set in the North
To circle the Pole in idiot majesty,
And wonder what was given them to wonder.
Style
© Howard Nemerov
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
Childhood
© Richard Aldington
How dull and greasy and grey and sordid it was!
On wet days -- it was always wet --
I used to kneel on a chair
And look at it from the window.
Upon A Wasp Chilled With Cold
© Edward Taylor
The bear that breathes the northern blast
Did numb, torpedo-like, a wasp
Whose stiffened limbs encramped, lay bathing
In Sol's warm breath and shine as saving,
Author's Prologue
© Dylan Thomas
This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
There Was A Saviour
© Dylan Thomas
There was a saviour
Rarer than radium,
Commoner than water, crueller than truth;
Children kept from the sun
How Shall My Animal
© Dylan Thomas
How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall,
Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait
© Dylan Thomas
The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.
This Side Of The Truth
© Dylan Thomas
(for Llewelyn)This side of the truth,
You may not see, my son,
King of your blue eyes
In the blinding country of youth,
A Child's Christmas In Wales
© Dylan Thomas
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound
except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember
whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve
nights when I was six.
The wind drew off
© Emily Dickinson
The wind drew off
Like hungry dogs
Defeated of a bone --
Through fissures in
The Combat
© Edwin Muir
It was not meant for human eyes,
That combat on the shabby patch
Of clods and trampled turf that lies
Somewhere beneath the sodden skies
For eye of toad or adder to catch.
