Failure poems
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Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
© Adrienne Rich
The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
From a Survivor
© Adrienne Rich
I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
© Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
The Backsheesh Sergeant
© Skeyhill Tom
'E's a sneakin' smoogin' blighter, an' 'e'll never make a fighter, Unless it's 'gainst a wounded chap like me;'E's a cringin', crawlin' 'ound, an' a coward, I'll be bound,An' I don't know why 'e crossed the bloomin' sea
A Prayer for Yeats's Son
© Rowley Rosemarie
Once more the mob is howling and half hidUnder the cupola of the dustbin lidMy child screams on: there is no obstacleSave Paul's edict and the seven bare hillsWhereby the television, and unrestBred in the church for centuries, can be stayedAnd for an hour I have walked and prayedBecause there is no room for my kind
Sestina Otiosa
© Raleigh Walter Alexander
Our great work, the Otia Merseiana,Edited by learned Mister Sampson,And supported by Professor Woodward,Is financed by numerous Bogus MeetingsHastily convened by Kuno MeyerTo impose upon the Man of Business
On Realizing His Toddler Will Become a Woman
© Neilson Shane
That you will suffer,that you will learn of worlds,that you will leave hereand contemplate failure,the tears that well upof their own accord
MRI
© Neilson Shane
The particulates of matterand one man on a plastic slab,lying so still a black bear,
March
© Susan Frances Harrison
Here on the wide waste lands,Take--child--these trembling hands,Though my life be as blank and waste,My days as sorely ungracedBy glimmer of green on the rimOf a sunless wilderness dim,As the wet fields barren and brown,As the fork of each sterile limbShorn of its lustrous crown
The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne
© Gelett Burgess
WAKE! For the Hack can scatter into flightShakespere and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-liner is Abroad, and strikesOur Modern Literature with blithering Blight.
Sonnets from the Portuguese: XV
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wearToo calm and sad a face in front of thine;For we two look two ways, and cannot shineWith the same sunlight on our brow and hair
Paracelsus: Part II: Paracelsus Attains
© Robert Browning
Ay, my brave chronicler, and this same hour
As well as any: now, let my time be!
Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind. In Three Cantos. - Canto I.
© Matthew Prior
Without these aids, to be more serious,
Her power they hold had been precarious;
The eyes might have conspired her ruin,
And she not known what they were doing.
Foolish it had been and unkind
That they should see and she be blind.
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - May
© George MacDonald
1.
WHAT though my words glance sideways from the thing
The Child Of The Islands - Opening
© Caroline Norton
I.
OF all the joys that brighten suffering earth,
What joy is welcomed like a new-born child?
What life so wretched, but that, at its birth,
