Morning poems
/ page 308 of 310 /
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
© Emily Dickinson
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers --
Untouched my Morning
And untouched by Noon --
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection --
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
"Sic transit gloria mundi"
© Emily Dickinson
"Sic transit gloria mundi,"
"How doth the busy bee,"
"Dum vivimus vivamus,"
I stay mine enemy!
A Route of Evanescence
© Emily Dickinson
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel --
A Resonance of Emerald --
A Rush of Cochineal --
A slash of Blue
© Emily Dickinson
A slash of Blue --
A sweep of Gray --
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an Evening Sky --
The Red -- Blaze -- is the Morning
© Emily Dickinson
The Red -- Blaze -- is the Morning --
The Violet -- is Noon --
The Yellow -- Day -- is falling --
And after that -- is none --
The house where I was born (07)
© Yves Bonnefoy
I have crossed out
These words a hundred times, in verse, in prose,
But I cannot
Stop them from coming back.)
Wallace Stevens On His Way To Work
© David Wagoner
He would leave early and walk slowly
As if balancing books
On the way to school, already expecting
To be tardy once again and heavy
Summer Dawn
© Spike Milligan
My sleeping children are still flying dreams
in their goose-down heads.
The lush of the river singing morning songs
Fish watch their ceilings turn sun-white.
Mirror, Mirror
© Spike Milligan
A young spring-tender girl
combed her joyous hair
'You are very ugly' said the mirror.
But,
Hanging Fire
© Audre Lorde
I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his tumb
Ionian
© Constantine Cavafy
Just because we've torn their statues down,
and cast them from their temples,
doesn't for a moment mean the gods are dead.
Land of Ionia, they love you yet,
Desires
© Constantine Cavafy
Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; with none of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a bright morning.
Morning Sea
© Constantine Cavafy
Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile.
The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,
the yellow shore; all lovely,
all bathed in light.
Ithaka
© Constantine Cavafy
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Villanelle: The Psychological Hour
© Ezra Pound
I had over prepared the event,
that much was ominous.
With middle-ageing care
I had laid out just the right books.
I had almost turned down the pages.
Snake
© John Burnside
As cats bring their smiling
mouse-kills and hypnotised birds,
slinking home under the light
of a summer's morning
to offer the gift of a corpse,
Rahel to Varnhagen
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
NOTE.Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married, after many protestations on her part, in 1814. The marriageso far as he was concerned at any rateappears to have been satisfactory.
Now you have read them all; or if not all,
As many as in all conscience I should fancy
To be enough. There are no more of them
Stafford's Cabin
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;
And something happened here before my memory began.
Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flame
And all we have of them is now a legend and a name.
Atherton's Gambit
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Master played the bishops pawn,
For jest, while Atherton looked on;
The master played this way and that,
And Atherton, amazed thereat,
The Town Down by the River
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
ISaid the Watcher by the Way
To the young and the unladen,
To the boy and to the maiden,
"God be with you both to-day.
