All Poems
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Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack
© Rudyard Kipling
As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled
Once, twice, and again!
And a doe leaped up - and a doe leaped up
From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.
This I, scouting alone, beheld,
Once, twice, and again!
Ninth Inning
© David Lehman
He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day,
Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm,
Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate
Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said
Love Lives Beyond The Tomb
© John Clare
Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew-
Ode To Modern Art
© David Lehman
Come on in and stay a while
I'll photograph you emerging from the revolving door
like Frank O'Hara dating the muse of modern art
Talking about the big Pollock show is better
To Psyche
© David Lehman
The longer I stare the lovelier
you look in my eyes (so made such
mirrors and spies) and I'm not done
yet as I enumerate the virtues
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: XXXII
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I had stopped to read a handbill of the play,
Caught by the lettering. Thus it was I read,
``Programme of this night's pieces, Saturday
The twentieth of October, `X. Y. Z.,'
Tenth Commandment
© David Lehman
The woman said yes she would go to Australia with him
Unless he heard wrong and she said Argentina
Where they could learn the tango and pursue the widows
Of Nazi war criminals unrepentant to the end.
Sappers
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!
Wittgenstein's Ladder
© David Lehman
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Book Sixth [Cambridge and the Alps]
© William Wordsworth
A passing word erewhile did lightly touch
On wanderings of my own, that now embraced
With livelier hope a region wider far.
Fifth Amendment
© David Lehman
The fear of perjuring herself turned into a tacit
Admission of her guilt. Yet she had the skill
And the luck to elude her implacable pursuers.
God was everywhere like a faceless guard in a gallery.
To Mrs. Norton
© Frances Anne Kemble
I never shall forget thee'tis a word
Thou oft nust hear, for surely there be none
October 12
© David Lehman
My bag was missing at the airport
"Just one bag?" "Yes, but it meant a lot to me"
I had seen the bartender before, but where?
"You didn't tell me you had been to Oxford"
August 15
© David Lehman
My new Web site is dropdead.com
It's interactive you get to choose how
you'll die, where, and at what age
and it'll still come as a complete
A Lover Since Childhood
© Robert Graves
Tangled in thought am I,
Stumble in speech do I?
Do I blunder and blush for the reason why?
Wander aloof do I,
Lean over gates and sigh,
Making friends with the bee and the butterfly?
Eleventh Hour
© David Lehman
The bloom was off the economic recovery.
"I just want to know one thing," she said.
What was that one thing? He'll never know,
Because at just that moment he heard the sound
The Final Reckoning
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Twas a wild and stormy sunset, changing tints of lurid red
Flooded mountain top and valley and the low clouds overhead;
And the rays streamed through the windows of a building stately, high,
Whose wealthy, high-born master had lain him down to die.
March 30
© David Lehman
Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day
which is not my birthday but will do until
the eleventh of June comes around and I know
what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat
"I went down to post a letter"
© Lesbia Harford
I went down to post a letter
Through the garden, through the garden.
All the lovely stars were shining
As I went.
