Poems begining by B
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Belly Dancer
© Diane Wakoski
Can these movements which move themselves
be the substance of my attraction?
Where does this thin green silk come from that covers my body?
Surely any woman wearing such fabrics
would move her body just to feel them touching every part of her.
Bixby’s Landing
© Robinson Jeffers
They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down here in an iron car
On a long cable; here the ships warped in
Bouquet
© Langston Hughes
Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow
Blasting from Heaven
© Philip Levine
The little girl won’t eat her sandwich;
she lifts the bun and looks in, but the grey beef
coated with relish is always there.
Her mother says, “Do it for mother.”
Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off
like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch.
Biographer
© Samuel Menashe
Authorized, booked
By my steadfast prose
The dead I ghost write
Shed shadows that shine
With hindsight, hearsay—
The last word is mine
Book Of Proverbs
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
CALL on the present day and night for nought,
Save what by yesterday was brought.
Bel Canto
© Kenneth Koch
The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp,
And salty light reveals the Mayan School.
Blood
© Naomi Shihab Nye
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
Bailing Out-A Poem for the 1970s
© Hugo Williams
Whose woods these are I think I know ...
The landings had gone wrong; white silk,
Bowery Afternoon
© Lola Ridge
Drab discoloration
Of faces, façades, pawn-shops,
Second-hand clothing,
Smoky and fly-blown glass of lunch-rooms,
Odors of rancid life…
Bridal Song
© William Shakespeare
ROSES, their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odour faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true;
Beginning My Studies
© Walt Whitman
BEGINNING my studies, the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness-these forms-the power of motion,
The least insect or animal-the senses-eyesight-love;
The first step, I say, aw'd me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wish'd to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time, to sing it in extatic songs.
Bantams in Pine-Woods
© Edwin Muir
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Bar Kochba
© Emma Lazarus
Weep, Israel! your tardy meed outpour
Of grateful homage on his fallen head,
Beauty
© Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
