Failure poems
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Petit, The Poet
© Edgar Lee Masters
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel--
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens--
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Free from intrusion
© Ivan Donn Carswell
You awaken this time with a welcoming smile, an experience
sublime, not a dream the boner from Hell
has presented itself like a prospect of fate, and reasoned
debate be damned, youll argue its merits later.
Admire their style
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Im reading fellow poets blogs today,
a sustaining source of entertainment;
I admire their style without exciting comment
or resorting to an unkind eye, simple though
it is to sigh about uneasy affirmation.
On the Mystery of the Incarnation
© Denise Levertov
It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
The House Of Dust: Part 04: 06: Cinema
© Conrad Aiken
The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry
To go our devious secret ways, forgetting
Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed,
We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.
The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.
The House Of Dust: Part 03: 07: Porcelain
© Conrad Aiken
Study them . . . you will see there, in the porcelain,
If you stare hard enough, a sort of swimming
Of lights and shadows, ghosts within a crystal
My brain unfolding! There you'll see me sitting
Day after day, close to a certain window,
Looking down, sometimes, to see the people . . .
The House Of Dust: Complete (Long)
© Conrad Aiken
. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . . I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode called "The Screen Maiden"
in Part II.
The Mother Poem (two)
© Jackie Kay
Now when people say ah but
It's not like having your own child though is it
I say of course it is what else is it
She's my child I have brought her up
Told her stories wept at losses
Laughed at her pleasures she is mine.
Vespers
© Louise Gluck
In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
Inferno (English)
© Dante Alighieri
CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Death Of A Poet
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Last Night As I Was Sleeping
© Antonio Machado
Last night as I slept,
I dreamtmarvelous error!
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.
Villanelle At Sundown
© Donald Justice
Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.
Faint Yet Pursuing
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Heroic Good, target for which the young
Dream in their dreams that every bow is strung,
And, missing, sigh
Unfruitful, or as disbelievers die,
New Year's Morning
© Helen Hunt Jackson
Only a night from old to new!
Never a night such changes brought.
The Old Year had its work to do;
No New Year miracles are wrought.
