Positive poems
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Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Stupid Meditation on Peace
© Robert Pinsky
Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,
Symbol not only of Peace but sexual
Love, the couple nestled and brooding.
After the Last Bulletins
© Lola Ridge
After the last bulletins the windows darken
And the whole city founders readily and deep,
Sliding on all its pillows
To the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep,
Under The Willows
© James Russell Lowell
Frank-hearted hostess of the field and wood,
Gypsy, whose roof is every spreading tree,
How Jack Made The Giants Uncommonly Sore
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
And this is The Moral that lies in the verse:
If you have a go farther, you're apt to fare
Worse.
(When you turn it around it is different rather: -
You're not apt to go worse if you have a fair
father!)
Amours De Voyage, Canto I
© Arthur Hugh Clough
I am to tell you, you say, what I think of our last new acquaintance.
Well, then, I think that George has a very fair right to be jealous.
I do not like him much, though I do not dislike being with him.
He is what people call, I suppose, a superior man, and
Certainly seems so to me; but I think he is terribly selfish.
An Epistle To Fleetwood Shephard, Esq. Burleigh, May 14, 1689
© Matthew Prior
Sir,
As once a twelvemonth to the priest,
Chanting The Square Deific
© Walt Whitman
But as the seasons, and gravitation-and as all the appointed days,
that forgive not,
I dispense from this side judgments inexorable, without the least
remorse.
The Lost Purse
© Edgar Albert Guest
I remember the excitement and the terrible alarm
That worried everybody when William broke his arm;
An' how frantic Pa and Ma got only jes' the other day
When they couldn't find the baby coz he'd up an' walked away;
But I'm sure there's no excitement that our house has ever shook
Like the times Ma can't remember where she's put her pocketbook.
Self-Portrait At 28
© David Berman
If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.
The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated by Samuel Johnson
© Samuel Johnson
Yet still the gen'ral Cry the Skies assails
And Gain and Grandeur load the tainted Gales;
Few know the toiling Statesman's Fear or Care,
Th' insidious Rival and the gaping Heir.
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - March
© George MacDonald
1.
THE song birds that come to me night and morn,
Don Juan: Canto The Fifteenth
© George Gordon Byron
Ah!--What should follow slips from my reflection;
Whatever follows ne'ertheless may be
No Children, No Pets by Sue Ellen Thompson: American Life in Poetry #89 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, tuck the memories away, then go on to see the possibility of a new and promising chapter in one's life.
Aurora Leigh: Book One
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed.
The Building Of The Cloud-Cuckoo-Town
© Aristophanes
_Mess_.--A most amazing, astonishing work it is!
So that Theagenes and Proxenides
Might flourish and gasconade and prance away
Quite at their ease, both of them four-in-hand,
Driving abreast upon the breadth of wall,
Each in his own new chariot.
