The tsar our little father had grown old, very old. Now he could not even strangle a dove with his own hands. Sitting on his throne he was golden and frigid. Only his beard grew, down to the floor and farther.

Then someone else ruled, it was not known who. Curious folk peeped into the palace windows but Krivonosov screened the windows with gibbets. Thus only the hanged saw anything.

Books

© Zora Bernice May Cross

Oh! Bury me in books when I am dead,

Fair quarto leaves of ivory and gold,

When April Comes!

© Virna Sheard

When April comes with softly shining eyes,
And daffodils bound in her wind-blown hair,
Oh, she will coax all clouds from out the skies,
And every day will bring some sweet surprise,--
The swallows will come swinging through the air
When April comes!

The Story Of Glaucus The Thessalian

© Paul Hamilton Hayne

Up to the deep founts of the tenderest eyes
That e'er have shone, I think, since in some dell
Of Argos and enchanted Thessaly,
The poet, from whose heart-lit brain it came,
Murmured this record unto her he loved?

Recollection of the Arabian Nights

© Alfred Tennyson

WHEN the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free

In the silken sail of infancy,

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:

© Stefan Anton George

Vergiss auch diese lezten astern nicht,
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von grünem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Il Cinque Maggio (English)

© Alessandro Manzoni

HE was -- As motionless as lay,

First mingled with the dead,

Opinion

© George Chapman

There is no truth of any good

To be discerned on earth ; and, by conversion,

The Fall Of The Leaf

Earnest and sad the solemn tale

That the sighing winds give back,

Cat

Again and again through the day
I meet a cat.
In the tree's shade, in the sun, in the crowding brown leaves.
After the success of a few fish bones

Pheasant

© Sylvia Plath

You said you would kill it this morning.
Do not kill it. It startles me still,
The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing

The Abencerrage : Canto I.

Lonely and still are now thy marble halls,
Thou fair Alhambra! there the feast is o'er;
And with the murmur of thy fountain-falls,
Blend the wild tones of minstrelsy no more.

Tooth Painter by Lucille Lang Day : American Life in Poetry #254 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004

© Ted Kooser

What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California. Tooth Painter

He was tall, lean, serious