All Poems
/ page 11 of 3210 /
Five Towns on the B. and O
© Carl Sandburg
BY day … tireless smokestacks … hungry smoky shanties hanging to the slopes … crooning: We get by, that’s all.
By night … all lit up … fire-gold bars, fire-gold flues … and the shanties shaking in clumsy shadows … almost the hills shaking … all crooning: By God, we’re going to find out or know why.
Passing away, saith the World
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth, sapp'd day by day:
Through These Pale Cold Days
© Isaac Rosenberg
Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,
The Jew
© Isaac Rosenberg
Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.
God
© Isaac Rosenberg
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
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.
The Grownup
© Rainer Maria Rilke
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.
The Gazelle
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words
ever attain the harmony of pure rhyme
that pulses through you as your body stirs?
Out of your forehead branch and lyre climb
Victory
© Adrienne Rich
Suddenly instead of art we're eyeing
organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows
a beautiful tumor
Stepping Backward
© Adrienne Rich
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law
© Adrienne Rich
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."
Rural Reflections
© Adrienne Rich
This is the grass your feet are planted on.
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never found
A way to make the grass mean what you mean.
Power
© Adrienne Rich
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
© Adrienne Rich
The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
Our Whole Life
© Adrienne Rich
Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts
like the Algerian
who waled form his village, burning
Orion
© Adrienne Rich
Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young
