War poems
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Sonnet XXV
© William Shakespeare
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Sonnet 71
© William Shakespeare
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
The Working Party
© Siegfried Sassoon
Three hours ago, he stumbled up the trench;
Now he will never walk that road again:
He must be carried back, a jolting lump
Beyond all needs of tenderness and care.
The Second Elegy
© Rainer Maria Rilke
If only we too could discover a pure contained
human place our own strip of fruit-bearing soil
between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds us
as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it gazing
into images that soothe it into the godlike bodies
where measured more greatly if achieves a greater repose.
From an Atlas of the Difficult World
© Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
Modern Love L: Thus Piteously Love
© George Meredith
Thus piteously Love closed what he begat:
The union of this ever-diverse pair!
A Sincere Man Am I
© José Martí
A sincere man am I
From the land where palm trees grow,
And I want before I die
My soul's verses to bestow.
Inheritance-His
© Audre Lorde
Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?
M. Degas Teaches Art and Science At Durfee Intermediate School--Detroit, 1942
© Philip Levine
He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
The Lights of Cobb and Co
© Henry Lawson
Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;
A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;
F?sulan Idyl
© Walter Savage Landor
She drew back
The boon she tendered, and then, finding not
The ribbon at her waist to fix it in,
Dropt it, as loth to drop it, on the rest.
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?
She wears a round skirt
© Amir Khosrow
She wears a round skirt, stands on one leg,
That lady has eight legs,
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.
At Lulworth Cove A Century Back
© Thomas Hardy
Had I but lived a hundred years ago
I might have gone, as I have gone this year,
By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,
And Time have placed his finger on me there:
