Poetry poems
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A Fantasy of War
© Henry Lawson
The Bells and the Child.
The gongs are in the templethe bells are in the tower;
The tom-tom in the jungle and the town clock tells the hour;
And all Thy feathered kind at morn have testified Thy power.
On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest by Jeff Worley : American Life in Poetry #
© Ted Kooser
A poem is an experience like any other, and we can learn as much or more about, say, an apple from a poem about an apple as from the apple itself. Since I was a boy, I’ve been picking up things, but I’ve never found a turtle shell until I found one in this poem by Jeff Worley, who lives in Kentucky.
On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest
This one got tired
Satire II
© John Donne
Sir; though (I thanke God for it) I do hate
Perfectly all this towne, yet there's one state
December Notes by Nancy McCleery: American Life in Poetry #39 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20
© Ted Kooser
Many of us keep journals, but while doing so few of us pay much attention to selecting the most precise words, to determining their most effective order, to working with effective pauses and breath-like pacing, to presenting an engaging impression of a single, unique day. This poem by Nebraskan Nancy McCleery is a good example of one poet’s carefully recorded observations.
December Notes
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
Houdini by Kay Ryan: American Life in Poetry #108 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Houdini never gets far from the news. There's always a movie coming out, or a book, and every other magician has to face comparison to the legendary master. Here the California poet, Kay Ryan, encapsulates the man and says something wise about celebrity.
At The "Atlantic" Dinner
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
DECEMBER 15, 1874
I SUPPOSE it's myself that you're making allusion to
Don Juan: Canto The Eleventh
© George Gordon Byron
When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,'
And proved it--'twas no matter what he said:
Cutting Hair by Minnie Bruce Pratt: American Life in Poetry #190 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Occupational hazards, well, you have to find yourself in the occupation to know about those. Here Minnie Bruce Pratt of Alabama gives us an inside look at a kind of work we all have benefited from but may never have thought much about.
Cutting Hair
To One who Loved not Poetry
© Sappho
THOU liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.
The barren music of a word or phrase,
© Christopher Morley
THE barren music of a word or phrase,
The futile arts of syllable and stress,
He sought. The poetry of common days
He did not guess.
My Son the Man by Sharon Olds: American Life in Poetry #70 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
As a man I'll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can take us so far into someone else's experience that we feel it's our own.
My Son the Man
Dedicatory Poem: To George Sigerson, Poet And Scholar
© Padraic Colum
Two men of art, they say, were with the sons
Of Milé,a poet and a harp player,
When Milé, having taken Ireland, left
The land to his sons rule; the poet was
Cir, and fair Cendfind was the harp player.
The Pick by Cecilia Woloch : American Life in Poetry #236 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Cecilia Woloch teaches in California, and when she’s not with her students she’s off to the Carpathian Mountains of Poland, to help with the farm work. But somehow she resisted her wanderlust just long enough to make this telling snapshot of her father at work.
The Pick
I watched him swinging the pick in the sun,
An Essay On The Different Stiles Of Poetry
© Thomas Parnell
I hate the Vulgar with untuneful Mind,
Hearts uninspir'd, and Senses unrefin'd.
Hence ye Prophane, I raise the sounding String,
And Bolingbroke descends to hear me sing.
Army Of Northern Virginia
© Stephen Vincent Benet
He only said it once-the marble closed-
There was a man enclosed within that image.
There was a force that tried Proportion's rule
And died without a legend or a cue
To bring it back. The shadow-Lees still live.
But the first-person and the singular Lee?
The Progress Of A Divine: Satire
© Richard Savage
All priests are not the same, be understood!
Priests are, like other folks, some bad, some good.
What's vice or virtue, sure admits no doubt;
Then, clergy, with church mission, or without;
When good, or bad, annex we to your name,
The greater honour, or the greater shame.
On A Moonstruck Gravel Road by Rodney Torreson: American Life in Poetry #49 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet La
© Ted Kooser
This fine poem by Rodney Torreson, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood, and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship.
On A Moonstruck Gravel Road
The sheep-killing dogs saunter home,
wool scraps in their teeth.
The Poetry Of Keats
© George Meredith
The song of a nightingale sent thro' a slumbrous valley,
Low-lidded with twilight, and tranced with the dolorous sound,
Tranced with a tender enchantment; the yearning of passion
That wins immortality even while panting delirious with death.
Music And Sweet Poetry
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
How sweet it is to sit and read the tales
Of mighty poets and to hear the while
Sweet music, which when the attention fails
Fills the dim pause--
Raschi In Prague
© Emma Lazarus
Raschi of Troyes, the Moon of Israel,
The authoritative Talmudist, returned
