Animal poems
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Face Stolen From a Bird
© Judith Skillman
I don't know who you're hiding
behind your mask,
your face stolen from a bird,
imprisoned by red ashes.
I will love you the way one dies.
Visage volè l'oiseau
© Judith Skillman
Je ne sais qui tu caches
sous ton visage inventè,
ton visage volè l'oiseau,
emprisonnè de cendre rouge.
Je vais t'aimer comme on meurt.
The Perch
© Galway Kinnell
There is a fork in a branch
of an ancient, enormous maple,
one of a grove of such trees,
where I climb sometimes and sit and look out
Adela
© Aleister Crowley
Jupiter Mars P Moon
VENEZIA, "May" 19"th", 1910.
Jupiter's foursquare blaze of gold and blue
Rides on the moon, a lilac conch of pearl,
The Beast
© Sylvia Plath
He won't be got rid of:
Memblepaws, teary and sorry,
Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's unfamiliar.
A dustbin's enough for him.
The dark's his bone.
Call him any name, he'll come to it.
In The Deep Museum
© Anne Sexton
My God, my God, what queer corner am I in?
Didn't I die, blood running down the post,
lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin
of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost?
The Division Of Parts
© Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
Crossing The Atlantic
© Anne Sexton
Oh my Atlantic of the cracked shores,
those blemished gates of Rockport and Boothbay,
those harbor smells like the innards of animals!
Old childish Queen, where did you go,
you bayer at wharfs and Victorian houses?
The Earth
© Anne Sexton
God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.
It Is A Spring Afternoon
© Anne Sexton
Everything here is yellow and green.
Listen to its throat, its earthskin,
the bone dry voices of the peepers
as they throb like advertisements.
The Break Away
© Anne Sexton
I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.
The Poet Of Ignorance
© Anne Sexton
I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?
That Day
© Anne Sexton
This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
The Evil Seekers
© Anne Sexton
We are born with luck
which is to say with gold in our mouth.
As new and smooth as a grape,
as pure as a pond in Alaska,
The Witch's Life
© Anne Sexton
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
Unknown Girl In A Maternity Ward
© Anne Sexton
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
The Fury Of Cocks
© Anne Sexton
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
"Daddy" Warbucks
© Anne Sexton
In MemoriamWhat's missing is the eyeballs
in each of us, but it doesn't matter
because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
You let me touch them, fondle the green faces
Suicide Note
© Anne Sexton
Once upon a time
my hunger was for Jesus.
O my hunger! My hunger!
Before he grew old
he rode calmly into Jerusalem
in search of death.
Parnell's Funeral
© William Butler Yeats
The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay.
Had de Valera eaten parnell's heart
No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day.
No civil rancour torn the land apart.
