Animal poems
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My Bed is Covered Yellow
© Peter Orlovsky
My bed is covered yellow - Oh Sun, I sit on you
Oh golden field I lay on you
Oh money I dream of you
More, More, cried the bed - talk to me more -
I Vent My Wrath On Animals
© Jerome Rothenberg
I came alive
when things went
crazy.
I pulled the plug on
Custer
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
BOOK FIRST.I.ALL valor died not on the plains of Troy.
Awake, my Muse, awake! be thine the joy
To sing of deeds as dauntless and as brave
As e'er lent luster to a warrior's grave.
Friar Philip's Geese
© Jean de La Fontaine
THE FAIR my pages safely may pursue,
And this apology they'll not refuse.
What recompense can I presume to make?
A tale I'll give, where female charms partake,
And prove resistless whatsoe'er assail:
Blessed BEAUTY, NATURE ever should prevail.
The Human Face
© Paul Eluard
Of all the springtimes of the world
This one is the ugliest
Of all of my ways of being
To be trusting is the best
Merlin II
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs,
Balance-loving nature
Made all things in pairs.
Merlin
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
I
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Moon In Virgo
© James Lee Jobe
You are not beaten. The simple music rises up,
children's voices in the air, sound floating out
A Nervous Governor-General
© Andrew Barton Paterson
We read in the press that Lord Northcote is here
To take up Lord Tennyson's mission.
'Tis pleasant to find they have sent us a Peer,
And a man of exalted position.
The Scapegoat
© Andrew Barton Paterson
We have all of us read how the Israelites fled
From Egypt with Pharaoh in eager pursuit of 'em,
And Pharaoh's fierce troop were all put "in the soup"
When the waters rolled softly o'er every galoot of 'em.
In the Droving Days
© Andrew Barton Paterson
"Only a pound," said the auctioneer,
"Only a pound; and I'm standing here
Selling this animal, gain or loss --
Only a pound for the drover's horse?
The Woman At The Washington Zoo
© Randall Jarrell
The saris go by me from the embassies.Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Rondeau at the Train Stop
© Erin Belieu
It bothers me: the genital smell of the bay
drifting toward me on the T stop, the train
circling the city like a dingy, year-round
Christmas display. The Puritans were right! Sin
is everywhere in Massachusetts, hell-bound
Georgic on Memory
© Erin Belieu
Make your daily monument the Ego,
use a masochist's epistemology
of shame and dog-eared certainty
that others less exacting might forgo.
Fairy Tale
© Katherine Mansfield
Now this is the story of Olaf
Who ages and ages ago
Lived right on the top of a mountain,
A mountain all covered with snow.
Wind Chill
© Linda Pastan
The door of winter
is frozen shut, and like the bodies
of long extinct animals, cars lie abandoned wherever
the cold road has taken them. How ceremonious snow is,
The New Dog
© Linda Pastan
Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper
and pen, has come
What We Want
© Linda Pastan
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
To Those Born After
© Bertolt Brecht
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
