History poems
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Father and Son
© Delmore Schwartz
FRANZ KAFKA
Father:
On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——
Encounter in the Local Pub
© Hugo Williams
Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
Magnificat
© Hugo Williams
When he had suckled there, he began
to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,
Chinese Whispers
© John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
In Jerusalem
© Mahmoud Darwish
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
Interesting Times
© Mark Jarman
Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.
You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:
The Sorcerer: Act I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
For to-day young Alexis-young Alexis Pointdextre
Is betrothed to Aline-to Aline Sangazure,
And that pride of his sex is-of his sex is to be next her
At the feast on the green-on the green, oh, be sure!
Sonnet 90: Stella, Think Not That I
© Sir Philip Sidney
Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history:
If thou praise not, all other praise is shame.
Looking into History
© Lola Ridge
Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye
Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.
Belief might lend them life again. I try
Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
The Canon Of Aughrim
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
You ask me of English honour, whether your Nation is just?
Justice for us is a word divine, a name we revere,
Alas, no more than a name, a thing laid by in the dust.
The world shall know it again, but not in this month or year.
Note to Reality
© Tony Hoagland
but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass
thrust up above the January snow.
Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,
from the museum series on European masters.
Augustus Peabody Gardner
© John Jay Chapman
I SEEwithin my spiritmystic walls,
And slender windows casting hallowed light
Bread, Hashish And Moon
© Nizar Qabbani
When the moon is born in the east,
And the white rooftops drift asleep
Domestic Violence
© Eavan Boland
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.
These Old Songs
© Edwin Brock
grow in the mind,
their rhymes chiming endlessly
with the sound of feet walking
or rain falling or being taken up
by garden birds, one line at a time.
