Family poems

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Was It You?

© Robert William Service

"Hullo, young Jones! with your tie so gay
And your pen behind your ear;
Will you mark my cheque in the usual way?
For I'm overdrawn, I fear."

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Pragmatic

© Robert William Service

When young I was an Atheist,
Yea, pompous as a pigeon
No opportunity I missed
To satirize religion.

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The Three Bares

© Robert William Service

Well, Ma was mighty glad to get that worry off her mind,
And hefting up the bucket so combustibly inclined,
She hurried down the garden to that refuge so discreet,
And dumped the liquid menace safely through the centre seat.

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Domestic Scene

© Robert William Service

The meal was o'er, the lamp was lit,
The family sat in its glow;
The Mother never ceased to knit,
The Daughter never slacked to sew;

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The Call Of The Wild

© Robert William Service

Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?

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Infidelity

© Robert William Service

My husband put some poison in my beer,
And fondly hoped that I would drink it up.
He would get rid of me - no bloody fear,
For when his back was turned I changed the cup.
He took it all, and if he did not die,
Its just because he's heartier than I.

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My Last Dance

© Julia Ward Howe

Then, like a gallant swimmer, flinging high
My breast against the golden waves of sound,
I rode the madd'ning tumult of the dance,
Mocking fatigue, that never could be found.

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Mother's Day Proclamation

© Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:

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Paradise Regained: The Third Book

© John Milton

So spake the Son of God; and Satan stood
A while as mute, confounded what to say,
What to reply, confuted and convinced
Of his weak arguing and fallacious drift;

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Arcades

© John Milton

Part of an entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of
Darby at Harefield, by som Noble persons of her Family, who
appear on the Scene in pastoral habit, moving toward the seat
of State with this Song.

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Paradise Lost: Book 10

© John Milton

Mean while the heinous and despiteful act
Of Satan, done in Paradise; and how
He, in the serpent, had perverted Eve,
Her husband she, to taste the fatal fruit,

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Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats

© Percy Bysshe Shelley

I weep for Adonais--he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years

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Adonais

© Percy Bysshe Shelley

I weep for Adonais -he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years

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In Modern Dress

© Craig Raine

A pair of blackbirds
warring in the roses,
one or two poppies

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The Curtain

© Hayden Carruth

renewing field of corpse-flesh.
In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in

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American Beauty

© Carolyn Kizer

As you described your mastectomy in calm detail
and bared your chest so I might see
the puckered scar,
"They took a hatchet to your breast!" I said. "What an
Amazon you are."

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Saul

© Robert Browning

``Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his dew
``On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue
``Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild beat
``Were now raging to torture the desert!''

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Ginza Samba

© Robert Pinsky

A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone

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Death in the Family

© Julie Hill Alger

They call it stroke.
Two we loved were stunned
by that same blow of cudgel
or axe to the brow.

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True Love

© Robert Penn Warren

In silence the heart raves.It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning.I was ten, skinny, red-headed,