All Poems

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The Gold Lily

© Louise Gluck

As I perceive
I am dying now and know
I will not speak again, will not
survive the earth, be summoned

For Meng Hao-Jan

© Li Po

I love Master Meng.
Free as a flowing breeze,
He is famous
Throughout the world.

Labor Day

© Louise Gluck

Requiring something lovely on his arm
Took me to Stamford, Connecticut, a quasi-farm,
His family's; later picking up the mammoth
Girlfriend of Charlie, meanwhile trying to pawn me off

De Profundis Clamavi (Out Of The Depths I Have Cried)

© Charles Baudelaire

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Complaint Of Body, The Ass, Against His Rider, The Soul

© Stephen Vincent Benet

BODY

Well, here we go!

Circe's Grief

© Louise Gluck

In the end, I made myself
Known to your wife as
A god would, in her own house, in
Ithaca, a voice

Injustice of the Courts

© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

Whites alone upon the jury in a number of the states,
Thus they crush a helpless Negro with their prejudicial hates;
Legal ills they thrust upon him, and the tale is passing sad
Equal rights with white men? Never! Color-phobia makes them mad.

The White Lilies

© Louise Gluck

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.

The Times

© Wilcox Ella Wheeler

The times are not degenerate. Man's faith

Mounts higher than of old. No crumbling creed

Celestial Music

© Louise Gluck

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

Circe's Power

© Louise Gluck

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

Epitaph

© Robert Desnos

I lived in those times. For a thousand years
I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free amongst the masked slaves.

All Hallows

© Louise Gluck

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been

Chanson de pirates (Pirates' Song)

Nous emmenions en esclavage
Cent chrétiens, pêcheurs de corail ;
Nous recrutions pour le sérail
Dans tous les moûtiers du rivage.

The Fear Of Burial

© Louise Gluck

In the empty field, in the morning,
the body waits to be claimed.
The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock--
nothing comes to give it form again.

Under The Pressure Of Violent Anguish

© Robert Burns

O Thou Great Being! what Thou art,
Surpasses me to know;
Yet sure I am, that known to Thee
Are all Thy works below.

Portrait

© Louise Gluck

A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows