All Poems
/ page 2995 of 3210 /
The Breath Of Night
© Randall Jarrell
The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
Children Selecting Books In A Library
© Randall Jarrell
With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
Gunner
© Randall Jarrell
Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
The Player Piano
© Randall Jarrell
I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House
Run by a lady my age. She was gay.
When I told her that I came from Pasadena
She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena
When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus."
A Country Life
© Randall Jarrell
A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
Next Day
© Randall Jarrell
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
90 North
© Randall Jarrell
At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all nighttill at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.
The Black Swan
© Randall Jarrell
When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.
The Refugees
© Randall Jarrell
In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?
Cinderella
© Randall Jarrell
Her imaginary playmate was a grown-up
In sea-coal satin. The flame-blue glances,
The wings gauzy as the membrane that the ashes
Draw over an old ember --as the mother
The Woman At The Washington Zoo
© Randall Jarrell
The saris go by me from the embassies.Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Eighth Air Force
© Randall Jarrell
If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a can
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving
Whistles O Paradiso!--shall I say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?
A Sick Child
© Randall Jarrell
The postman comes when I am still in bed.
"Postman, what do you have for me today?"
I say to him. (But really I'm in bed.)
Then he says - what shall I have him say?
The Olive Garden
© Randall Jarrell
(Rainer Maria Rilke)He went up under the gray leaves
All gray and lost in the olive lands
And laid his forehead, gray with dust,
Deep in the dustiness of his hot hands.
Losses
© Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
Hope
© Randall Jarrell
The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner
© Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Mercian Hymns VII
© Geoffrey Hill
Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay
unstirring. Eel-swarms. Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and
half-bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness
and silence.
Mercian Hymns XVII
© Geoffrey Hill
'God's honours - our bikes touched: he skidded and came off.' 'Liar.' A
timid father's protective bellow. Disfigurement of a village king. 'Just
look at the bugger...'
Mercian Hymns XXV
© Geoffrey Hill
Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in
memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent
in the nailer's darg.
