Business poems
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Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Sun and Moon
© Jane Kenyon
For Donald Clark
Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”
from A Ballad Upon A Wedding
© Sir John Suckling
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen;
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake, or fair.
A Prayer for My Daughter
© William Butler Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
Helen: A Revision
© Jack Spicer
And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost
And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost
Hope the cost.
Funeral Music
© Geoffrey Hill
William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483
Penumbra
© Amy Lowell
The old house will guard you,
As I have done.
Its walls and rooms will hold you,
And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies
As always,
From the pages of my books.
Cabin
© Anne Waldman
eviction people arrive to haunt me
with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers
how they are carpet of fierce colors
The Cleaving
© Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
© Thomas Gray
Ye distant spires, ye antique tow'rs,
That crown the wat'ry glade,
Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem
© Gregory Corso
I learned life were no dream
I learned truth deceived
Man is not God
Life is a century
Death an instant
Chinese Whispers
© John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
Paradise Regain'd: Book II (1671)
© Patrick Kavanagh
MEan while the new-baptiz'd, who yet remain'd
At Jordan with the Baptist, and had seen
The Sorcerer: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
For to-day young Alexis-young Alexis Pointdextre
Is betrothed to Aline-to Aline Sangazure,
And that pride of his sex is-of his sex is to be next her
At the feast on the green-on the green, oh, be sure!
Etiquette
© William Schwenck Gilbert
The BALLYSHANNON foundered off the coast of Cariboo,
And down in fathoms many went the captain and the crew;
Down went the owners - greedy men whom hope of gain allured:
Oh, dry the starting tear, for they were heavily insured.
Bird Parliament (translation of)
© Edward Fitzgerald
And first, with Heart so full as from his Eyes
Ran weeping, up rose Tajidar the Wise;
The mystic Mark upon whose Bosom show'd
That He alone of all the Birds THE ROAD
Had travell'd: and the Crown upon his Head
Had reach'd the Goal; and He stood forth and said:
