Cool poems
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The Sale of Saint Thomas
© Lascelles Abercrombie
Captain Well, I hope so.
There's threatening in the weather. Have you a mind
To hug your belly to the slanted deck,
Like a louse on a whip-top, when the boat
Spins on an axlie in the hissing gales?
De Profundis
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away
And yet my days go on, go on.
A Musical Instrument
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
The Boiling Water
© Kenneth Koch
A serious moment for the
telephone is when it rings.
And a person answers, it is
Angelica, or is it you.
I Will Praise the Lord at All Times
© William Cowper
Winter has a joy for me,
While the Saviour's charms I read,
Lowly, meek, from blemish free,
In the snowdrop's pensive head.
The Poplar Field
© William Cowper
The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade:
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Small Comfort
© Katha Pollitt
Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,
Ruins of Rome, by Bellay
© Edmund Spenser
1 Ye heavenly spirits, whose ashy cinders lie
Under deep ruins, with huge walls opprest,
But not your praise, the which shall never die
Through your fair verses, ne in ashes rest;
The Shepheardes Calender: October
© Edmund Spenser
The dapper ditties, that I wont devise,
To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,
Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?
They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise.
I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye:
What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
Monadnoc
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
I heard and I obeyed,
Assured that he who pressed the claim,
Well-known, but loving not a name,
Was not to be gainsaid.
Hamatreya
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.
Alphonso Of Castile
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
I Alphonso live and learn,
Seeing nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind,
Lemons run to leaves and rind,
The Rhodora
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
On being asked, Whence is the flower?In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
Moon In Virgo
© James Lee Jobe
You are not beaten. The simple music rises up,
children's voices in the air, sound floating out
The Old Timer's Steeplechase
© Andrew Barton Paterson
There was never a fence the tracks to guard, --
Some straggling posts defined 'em:
And the day was hot, and the drinking hard,
Till none of the stewards could see a yard
Before nor yet behind 'em!
The City of Dreadful Thirst
© Andrew Barton Paterson
The stranger came from Narromine and made his little joke--
"They say we folks in Narromine are narrow-minded folk.
But all the smartest men down here are puzzled to define
A kind of new phenomenon that came to Narromine.
In Defence of the Bush
© Andrew Barton Paterson
So you're back from up the country, Mister Lawson, where you went,
And you're cursing all the business in a bitter discontent;
Well, we grieve to disappoint you, and it makes us sad to hear
That it wasn't cool and shady -- and there wasn't whips of beer,
Gone Down
© Andrew Barton Paterson
To the voters of Glen Innes 'twas O'Sullivan that went,
To secure the country vote for Mister Hay.
So he told 'em what he'd borrowed, and he told 'em what he'd spent,
Though extravagance had blown it all away.
"Shouting" for a Camel
© Andrew Barton Paterson
But the camel kept on drinking and he filled his hold with water,
And the more he had inside him yet the more he seemed to need;
For he drank it by the gallon, and his girths grew taut and tauter,
And the miners muttered softly, "Yes he's very dry indeed!
But he's cheap, very cheap, as dromedaries go."
