All Poems
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Martha
© George MacDonald
With joyful pride her heart is high:
Her humble house doth hold
The man her nation's prophecy
Long ages hath foretold!
December 25
© David Lehman
Christmas defeated Chanukah
once again last night
by a margin of three billion dollars
or so, but every time I hear
Reconciliation
© Madison Julius Cawein
LISTEN, dearest! you must love me more,
More than you did before!
Hark, what a beating here of wings!
Never at rest,
How Fear Came
© Rudyard Kipling
The stream is shrunk-the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
Shake The Superflux!
© David Lehman
I like walking on streets as black and wet as this one
now, at two in the solemnly musical morning, when everyone else
in this town emptied of Lestrygonians and Lotus-eaters
is asleep or trying or worrying why
The Little Knight In Green
© Katharine Lee Bates
WHAT fragrant-footed comer
Is stepping oer my head?
April 24
© David Lehman
Did you know that Evian spelled backwards is naive?
I myself was unaware of this fact until last Tuesday night
when John Ashbery, Marc Cohen, and Eugene Richie
gave a poetry reading and I introduced them
The Body of Divinity Versifyed
© Cotton Mather
A God there is, a God of boundless Might,
In Wisdom, Justice, Goodness, Infinite.
Operation Memory
© David Lehman
We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.
Will
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,
Can circumvent or hinder or control
The firm resolve of a determined soul.
Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;
The Left Bank
© David Lehman
Don't walk away, Renee,
I'm just getting warmed up
your body is like a river
and I'm going to swim across
Quid Non Supremus, Amantes?
© Ernest Christopher Dowson
Why is there in the least touch of her hands
More grace than other women's lips bestow,
If love is but a slave in fleshly bands
Of flesh to flesh, wherever love may go?
January 31 (The sky is crumbling...)
© David Lehman
The sky is crumbling into millions of paper dots
the wind blows in my face
so I duck into my favorite barber shop
and listen to Vivaldi and look in the mirror
Rimas XIV
© Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
Te vi un punto, y, flotando ante mis ojos
La imagen de tus ojos se quedo,
Como la mancha obscura, orlada en fuego,
Que flota y ciega, si se mira al sol.
June 11
© David Lehman
It's my birtday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
A Match With The Moon
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
WEARY already, weary miles to-night
I walked for bed: and so, to get some ease,
