Teen poems
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Don Juan: Canto The Second
© George Gordon Byron
Oh ye! who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,
Holland, France, England, Germany, or Spain,
The Wife Of Brittany
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
TRUTH wed to beauty in an antique tale,
Sweet-voiced like some immortal nightingale,
Trills the clear burden of her passsionate lay,
As fresh, as fair as wonderful to-day
As when the music of her balmy tongue
Ravished the first warm hearts for whom she sung.
On
© Bob Kaufman
On yardbird corners of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear.
On yardbird corners of parkerflights to sound filled pockets in space.
On neuro-corners of striped brains & desperate electro-surgeons.
On alcohol corners of pointless discussion & historical hangovers.
Die Onse Vader (Our Father - The Lord's Prayer)
© Diederik Johannes Opperman
Ons Vader wat in die hemel is,
laat u Naam geheilig word;
laat u koninkryk kom;
laat u wil ook op die aarde geskied,
The Pet Coon
© James Whitcomb Riley
Noey Bixler ketched him, and fetched him in to me
When he's ist a little teenty-weenty baby-coon
185. The Humble Petition of Bruar Water
© Robert Burns
MY lord, I know your noble ear
Woe neer assails in vain;
Emboldend thus, I beg youll hear
Your humble slave complain,
310. Tam o Shanter: A Tale
© Robert Burns
This truth fand honest TAM O SHANTER,
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:
(Auld Ayr, wham neer a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonie lasses).
A Lover's Complaint
© William Shakespeare
FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale;
To Myrtilla
© Franklin Pierce Adams
Twelve fleeting years ago my Myrt,
(Ehu fugaces! maybe more)
I wrote of the directoire skirt
You wore.
Salesmanship, With Half A Dram Of Tears
© Brooks Haxton
Gripping the lectern, rocking it, searching
the faces for the souls, for signs of heartfelt
mindfulness at work, I thought, as I recited
words I wrote in tears: instead of tears,
Charlie Howard’s Descent
© Mark Doty
Between the bridge and the river
he falls through
a huge portion of night;
it is not as if falling
Iowa City: Early April
© Robert Hass
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
Power
© Elizabeth Daryush
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
Nights of 1964—1966: The Old Reliable
© Marilyn Hacker
for Lewis Ellingham
The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, “In a Notebook”
