Car poems
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The Caveman on the Train
© Daniel Nester
When first the apprizing eye and tongue that muttered
(Banished from Eden’s air? Or pride of apes?)
Sonnet 17
© Richard Barnfield
Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,
Might not compare with his pure ivorie white,
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
The Old Codger’s Lament
© Carl Rakosi
Who can say now,
“When I was young, the country was very beautiful?
Oaks and willows grew along the rivers
and there were many herbs and flowering bushes.
The forests were so dense the deer slipped through
the cottonwoods and maples unseen.”
Jerusalem
© Naomi Shihab Nye
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
—Tommy Olofsson, Sweden
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
The Book of Hours
© Boris Pasternak
Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons
hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled
Prodigal
© Richard Jones
You could drive out of this country
and attack the world with your ambition,
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The Waste Carpet
© William Matthews
O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.
A Muse of Water
© John Betjeman
We who must act as handmaidens
To our own goddess, turn too fast,
Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse
Gliding below her lake or sea,
Are left, long-staring after her,
Narcissists by necessity;
Sisters in Arms
© Elizabeth Daryush
Keys jingle in the door ajar threatening
whatever is coming belongs here
I reach for your sweetness
but silence explodes like a pregnant belly
into my face
a vomit of nevers.
Requests for Toy Piano
© Tony Hoagland
Play the one about the family of the ducks
where the ducks go down to the river
and one of them thinks the water will be cold
but then they jump in anyway
and like it and splash around.
The Uniform
© Marvin Bell
Of the sleeves, I remember their weight, like wet wool,
on my arms, and the empty ends which hung past my hands.
The Secular Masque
© John Dryden
JANUS
Since Momus comes to laugh below,
Old Time begin the show,
That he may see, in every scene,
What changes in this age have been,
After Midnight
© Louis Simpson
The dark streets are deserted,
With only a drugstore glowing
Softly, like a sleeping body;
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
