Animal poems
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Camouflaging the Chimera
© Yusef Komunyakaa
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
The Speaking Tree
© Katha Pollitt
for Robert Payne ?
Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned
The Rape of Europa
© Ovid
From "Metamorphoses," Book II, 846-875
Majesty is incompatible truly with love; they cohabit
A Woman on the Dump
© Debora Greger
Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump?
—Wallace Stevens
Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing,
the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread,
from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely
into these hollowed grounds,
Original Sin
© Robinson Jeffers
Meanwhile the intense color and nobility of sunrise,
Rose and gold and amber, flowed up the sky. Wet rocks were shining, a little wind
Stirred the leaves of the forest and the marsh flag-flowers; the soft valley between the low hills
Became as beautiful as the sky; while in its midst, hour after hour, the happy hunters
Roasted their living meat slowly to death.
Paradise Lost: Book IV
© Patrick Kavanagh
"Which of those rebel Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison? and, transform'd,
Why satt'st thou like an enemy in wait,
Here watching at the head of these that sleep?"
Heavy Summer Rain
© Jane Kenyon
The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day
From Violence to Peace
© James Russell Lowell
Twenty-eight shotgun pellets
crater my thighs, belly and groin.
I gently thumb each burnt bead,
fingering scabbed stubs with ointment.
In These Soft Trinities
© Patricia Goedicke
In an aura of charged air I remember
my poor mother turned into royalty,
my sister and me in bobby socks
Portrait of a Figure near Water
© Jane Kenyon
Rebuked, she turned and ran
uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner
arsonist, held a match to her brain.
She observed her life: against her will
it survived the unwavering flame.
I Know, I Remember, But How Can I Help You
© Hayden Carruth
The northern lights. I wouldn’t have noticed them
if the deer hadn’t told me
Parkinson’s Disease
© Washington Allston
While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward
© Anne Sexton
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
