Poems begining by A
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Amaryllis
© Connie Wanek
A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we've grown.
“A peanut sat on a railroad track ...”
© Pierre Reverdy
A peanut sat on a railroad track,
His heart was all a-flutter.
The five-fifteen came rushing by--
Toot toot! Peanut butter!
A Letter
© Amrita Pritam
Me—a book in the attic.
Maybe some covenant or hymnal.
Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra,
or a spell for intimate afflictions.
But then it seems I am none of these.
(If I were, someone would have read me.)
Amoretti LV: So oft as I her beauty do behold
© Edmund Spenser
Then needs another element inquire
Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky.
For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire,
And eke her love is pure immortal high.
Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,
Be like in mercy as in all the rest.
Amoretti I: Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands
© Edmund Spenser
Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might
A Modest Love
© Sir Edward Dyer
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.
A Magic Mountain
© Czeslaw Milosz
I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years
ago or three.
The same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before.
Soon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive,
Said that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed,
For here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.
A Friend Killed in the War
© Anthony Evan Hecht
In the clean brightness of magnesium
Flares, there were seven angels by a tree.
Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt
They were not really from Elysium.
And his flesh opened like a peony,
Red at the heart, white petals furling out.
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
© John Dryden
Stanza 4
The soft complaining flute
In dying notes discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute.
A.M. Fog
© Mark Jarman
Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking,
Holding on with dissolving hands,
Out of it came, not a line of old men,
But pairs of headlights, delaying morning.
Autumn Sky
© Charles Simic
In my great grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
An Exchange between the Fingers and the Toes
© John Fuller
Fingers:
Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets.
A Little Language
© Robert Duncan
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
Ars Poetica?
© Czeslaw Milosz
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
© Geoffrey Hill
And, after all, it is to them we return.
Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts:
lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn,
those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts.
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
A Visit from St. Nicholas
© Clement Clarke Moore
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
