Time poems
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The Four Seasons
© Obi Nwakanma
The forest hugs them
carves them into stones,
Etches them into the slow
eastern landscape: rivers, hills
the slow running water,
times broken inscapes…
Nadia
© Obi Nwakanma
Marrakech: the grey hairs of
Atlas, streaks of the light of years,
like truth accompanied by a bodyguard.
Lion and Honeycomb
© Howard Nemerov
He asked himself, poor moron, because he had
Nobody else to ask. The others went right on
Talking about form, talking about myth
And the (so help us) need for a modern idiom;
The verseballs among them kept counting syllables.
The Earthly Paradise: Apology
© William Morris
Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Modern Love XXXIV: Madam Would Speak With Me
© George Meredith
Madam would speak with me. So, now it comes:
The Deluge or else Fire! She's well, she thanks
Modern Love XX: I Am Not of Those
© George Meredith
I am not of those miserable males
Who sniff at vice and, daring not to snap,
Modern Love XVI: In Our Old Shipwrecked Days
© George Meredith
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
America
© Claude McKay
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Lyman King
© Edgar Lee Masters
You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Eugenia Todd
© Edgar Lee Masters
Have any of you, passers-by,
Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?
Resignation
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THERE is no flock however watched and tended
But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside howsoe'er defended
But has one vacant chair!
There is no Fatwa in this Land
© Taja Kramberger
There is no fatwa in this land –
it is divided into
thousands of small conspiracies,
tiny murders per partes,
which seem like coincidental misfortunes
and sap your blood, drop by drop.
Every Dead One Has a Name
© Taja Kramberger
A decade ago,
a high-ranking party official warned me:
Stay a poet, as long as there’s still time.
Still time? Time for what?
from Flying Home
© Galway Kinnell
that love is hard,
that while many good things are easy, true love is not,
because love is first of all a power,
its own power,
which continually must make its way forward, from night
into day, from transcending union always forward into difficult day.
Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard
© James Henry Leigh Hunt
We, the Fairies, blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.
Apple Tragedy
© Ted Hughes
So on the seventh day
The serpent rested,
God came up to him.
"I've invented a new game," he said.
His Wish To God
© Robert Herrick
I would to God, that mine old age might have
Before my last, but here a living grave;
His Prayer For Absolution
© Robert Herrick
For those my unbaptized rhymes,
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,
The Harvest Bow
© Seamus Justin Heaney
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
