Animal poems

/ page 19 of 37 /

Order by :

1
. . .
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
. . .
37

Sonnet

© Robert Hass

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.

He has loved her voice and listens with attention

Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,
And soon down ladders of reflected light
The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually
They separate on paths of long ago,
Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew
That leads, live as a nerve, to memory.

Waving Goodbye

© Gerald Stern

I wanted to know what it was like before we

had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we

"When I used to focus on the worries, everybody"

© Joanne Kyger

When I used to focus on the worries, everybody
was ahead of me, I was the bottom
of the totem pole,
a largely spread squat animal.

Ararat

© Mark Doty

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search

and shouting of Easter Sunday,

My Shoes

© Charles Simic

Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests.

Hooded Night

© Robinson Jeffers

At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have died,

And a wind moves. Moves in the dark

Misery and Splendor

© Robert Hass

Summoned by conscious recollection, she

would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,

Tears, Oily Tears . . .

© James Schuyler

Crying is a habit with me.

You mustn’t mind: onions make me

The Child Of The Islands - Summer

© Caroline Norton

I.
FOR Summer followeth with its store of joy;
That, too, can bring thee only new delight;
Its sultry hours can work thee no annoy,

Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset

© Stephen Edgar

The air is drenched with day, but one by one

The flowers close on cue,

That Child

© David Wagoner

That child was dangerous. That just-born

Newly washed and silent baby

Definition of the Frontiers

© Archibald MacLeish

First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide.
This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder.
When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us.
Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order.