All Poems
/ page 3031 of 3210 /
An Inscription
© Ambrose Bierce
A conqueror as provident as brave,
He robbed the cradle to supply the grave.
His reign laid quantities of human dust:
He fell upon the just and the unjust.
Weather
© Ambrose Bierce
Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be--
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth.
Safety-Clutch
© Ambrose Bierce
Once I seen a human ruin
In a elevator-well.
And his members was bestrewin'
All the place where he had fell.
Rimer
© Ambrose Bierce
The rimer quenches his unheeded fires,
The sound surceases and the sense expires.
Then the domestic dog, to east and west,
Expounds the passions burning in his breast.
The rising moon o'er that enchanted land
Pauses to hear and yearns to understand.
Piety
© Ambrose Bierce
The pig is taught by sermons and epistles
To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.
Freedom
© Ambrose Bierce
Freedom, as every schoolboy knows,
Once shrieked as Kosciusko fell;
On every wind, indeed, that blows
I hear her yell.
Elegy
© Ambrose Bierce
The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The wise man homewards plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.
Decalogue
© Ambrose Bierce
Thou shalt no God but me adore:
'Twere too expensive to have more.No images nor idols make
For Roger Ingersoll to break.Take not God's name in vain: select
A time when it will have effect.Work not on Sabbath days at all,
Alone
© Ambrose Bierce
In contact, lo! the flint and steel,
By sharp and flame, the thought reveal
That he the metal, she the stone,
Had cherished secretly alone.
Selecting A Reader
© Ted Kooser
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
In January
© Ted Kooser
Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
After Years
© Ted Kooser
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
A Birthday Poem
© Ted Kooser
Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
© Omar Khayyám
I.
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
Written On Sunday Morning
© Robert Southey
Go thou and seek the House of Prayer!
I to the Woodlands wend, and there
In lovely Nature see the GOD OF LOVE.
The swelling organ's peal
Winter
© Robert Southey
A wrinkled crabbed man they picture thee,
Old Winter, with a rugged beard as grey
As the long moss upon the apple-tree;
Blue-lipt, an icedrop at thy sharp blue nose,
To The Genius Of Africa
© Robert Southey
O thou who from the mountain's height
Roll'st down thy clouds with all their weight
Of waters to old Niles majestic tide;
Or o'er the dark sepulchral plain
To The Chapel Bell
© Robert Southey
"Lo I, the man who erst the Muse did ask
Her deepest notes to swell the Patriot's meeds,
Am now enforst a far unfitter task
For cap and gown to leave my minstrel weeds,"
For yon dull noise that tinkles on the air
Bids me lay by the lyre and go to morning prayer.
To My Own Minature Picture Taken At Two Years Of Age
© Robert Southey
And I was once like this! that glowing cheek
Was mine, those pleasure-sparkling eyes, that brow
Smooth as the level lake, when not a breeze
Dies o'er the sleeping surface! twenty years
To Mary Wollstonecraft
© Robert Southey
The lilly cheek, the "purple light of love,"
The liquid lustre of the melting eye,--
Mary! of these the Poet sung, for these
Did Woman triumph! with no angry frown
