History poems
/ page 24 of 51 /
The Grave
© Robert Blair
While some affect the sun, and some the shade,
Some flee the city, some the hermitage;
Their aims as various, as the roads they take
In journeying through life;the task be mine,
Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
(The Dry Salvagespresumably les trois sauvagesis a small
group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
Sweeney Erect
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!
Gus: The Theatre Cat
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
IMidwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
Breaking and Entering
© Ralph Angel
Many setups. At least as many falls.
Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here.
Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenous
wildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop,
all ignorance toboggans into know
© Edward Estlin Cummings
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?
guilt is the cause of more disorders
© Edward Estlin Cummings
guilt is the cause of more disorders
than history's most obscene marorders
Tomes
© Billy Collins
There is a section in my library for death
and another for Irish history,
a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,
and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books,
Dear Reader
© Billy Collins
Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.
I Ask You
© Billy Collins
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
Yes And No
© Laura Riding Jackson
Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas
I See A Woman Making Up
© Luis Benitez
I see a woman any woman making up and change
first she is thinking of something else (because when
a woman
begins to make up she hasn't yet separated this act
The Rock Cries Out to Us Today
© Maya Angelou
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Million Man March Poem
© Maya Angelou
The night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.
Still I Rise
© Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Song of the Exposition.
© Walt Whitman
1
AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
Apostroph.
© Walt Whitman
O MATER! O fils!
O brood continental!
O flowers of the prairies!
O space boundless! O hum of mighty products!
As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free.
© Walt Whitman
1
AS a strong bird on pinions free,
Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
Such be the thought Id think to-day of thee, America,
