Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year --
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Jimmy Sago, Jackaroo

© Anonymous

If you want a situation, I'll just tell you the plan
To get on to a station, I am just your very man.
Pack up the old portmanteau, and label it Paroo,
With a name aristocratic - Jimmy Sago, Jackaroo.

A Song Of Poppies

© Virna Sheard

I love red poppies! Imperial red poppies!
Sun-worshippers are they;
Gladly as trees live through a hundred summers
They live one little day.

A Storm In The Distance

© Paul Hamilton Hayne

I SEE the cloud-born squadrons of the gale,
Their lines of rain like glittering spears deprest
(While all the affrighted land grows darkly pale),
In flashing charge on earth's half-shielded breast;

Respice Finem

MY soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

A King's Soliloquy [On the Night of His Funeral]

© Thomas Hardy

From the slow march and muffled drum,
And crowds distrest,
And book and bell, at length I have come
To my full rest.

Favorites of Pan

Once, long ago, before the gods
Had left this earth, by stream and forest glade,
Where the first plough upturned the clinging sods,
Or the lost shepherd strayed,

The Cripple

© Leon Gellert

He totters round and dangles those odd shapes

That were his legs. His eyes are never dim.

SUN-SWEPT beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten
These were the same for Sappho as for me.