All Poems
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(Untitled) by Joette Giorgis : American Life in Poetry #250 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I’m very fond of poems that demonstrate their authors’ attentiveness to the world about them, as regular readers of this column have no doubt noticed. Here is a nine-word poem by Joette Giorgis, who lives in Pennsylvania, that is based upon noticing and then thinking about something so ordinary that it might otherwise be overlooked. Even the separate words are flat and commonplace. But so much feeling comes through!
(Untitled)
children grown-
Pharsalia - Book X: Caesar In Egypt
© Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
Caesar's ears in vain
Had she implored, but aided by her charms
The wanton's prayers prevailed, and by a night
Of shame ineffable, passed with her judge,
She won his favour.
To Ethna
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
First loved, last loved, best loved of all I've loved!
Ethna, my boyhood's dream, my manhood's light,
The Truant Dove, From Pilpay
© Charlotte Turner Smith
A MOUNTAIN stream, its channel deep
Beneath a rock's rough base had torn;
The Grass
© Emily Dickinson
And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearls
And make itself so fine
A Duchess were too common
For such a noticing
Problems Of A Journalist
© Weldon Kees
I want to get away somewhere and re-read Proust,
Said an editor of Newsweek to a man on Look.
Dachaus with telephones, Siberias with bonuses.
One reads, as winter settles on the town,
The evening paper, in an Irving Place café.
The River Of Dreams
© Henry Van Dyke
The river of dreams runs quietly down
From its hidden home in the forest of sleep,
All Blest Are They
© Sant Tukaram
All blest are they whose heart with pity grows.
Who left Vaikuntha.their home,to serve mankind;
Who slight their person's needs ( it is not myth)
Whose hearts are broad ; Whose lips with honey flow .
Stop Stealing the Napkins! : to Asinius Marrucinus
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
Asinius Marrucinus, you dont employ
your left hand too well: in wine and jest
Ode On The Sailing Of Our Troops For France
© John Jay Chapman
Go fight for Freedom, Warriors of the West!
At last the word is spoken: Go!
Lay on for Liberty. 'Twas at her breast
The tyrant aimed his blow;
And ye were wounded with the rest
In Belgium's overthrow.
Mothers' Splendid Dreams
© Edgar Albert Guest
Mothers dream such splendid dreams when their little babies smile,
Dreams of wondrous deeds they'll do in the happy after- while;
Every mother of a boy knows that in her arms is curled
One who some day will arise splendidly to serve the world.
Horace, Seventh Epode
© James Clerk Maxwell
Whither, whither, reckless Romans,
Are you rushing, sword in hand?
Has not yet the blood of brothers,
Fully stained the sea and land?
In a mountain village
© Saigyo
In a mountain village
at autumns end
thats where you learn
what sadness means
in the blast of the wintry wind.
Longing
© George Herbert
With sick and famisht eyes,
With doubling knees and weary bones,
To thee my cries,
To thee my grones,
To thee my sighs, my tears ascend:
No end?
September, 1819
© William Wordsworth
Nor doth the example fail to cheer
Me, conscious that my leaf is sere,
And yellow on the bough:-
Fall, rosy garlands, from my head!
Ye myrtle wreaths, your fragrance shed
Around a younger brow!
A New Pilgrimage: Sonnet XVI
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Gods, what a moral! Yet in vain I jest.
The France which has been, and shall be again,
Is the most serious, and perhaps the best,
Of all the nations which have power with men.
The Bird and the Hour
© Archibald Lampman
The sun looks over a little hill
And floods the valley with gold-
"He had served eighty masters. They'd have said"
© Lesbia Harford
He had served eighty masters. They'd have said
He "worked for these employers" to earn bread.
And they, if they had heard him, would have sneered
To brand him inefficient whom they feared.
For to know eighty masters is to know
What sort of thing men who are masters grow.
