Car poems
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Snow Day
© Billy Collins
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
The Cab Driver Who Ripped Me Off
© Cornelius Eady
That’s right, said the cab driver,
Turning the corner to the
White Oxen
© Louis Simpson
A man walks beside them
with a whip that he cracks.
The cart they draw is painted
with Saracens and Crusaders,
fierce eyes and ranks of spears.
Butchers
© C. K. Williams
1
Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,
The South
© Emma Lazarus
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
The Ragpickers' Wine
© Charles Baudelaire
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,
Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,
As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,
Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,
from Mercian Hymns
© Geoffrey Hill
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany
© Carl Sandburg
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.)
Be sad, be cool, be kind,
remembering those now dreamdust
hallowed in the ruts and gullies,
solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,
faces warblown in a falling rain.
The Jew and the Rooster Are One
© Gerald Stern
After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters
he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth,
Hands
© Robinson Jeffers
Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
from The Bridge: The Dance
© Hart Crane
The swift red flesh, a winter king
Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?
She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;
She spouted arms; she rose with maizeto die.
How We Were Introduced
© Zbigniew Herbert
—for perfidious protectors
I was playing in the street
no one paid attention to me
as I made forms out of sand
mumbling Rimbaud under my breath
Revenge
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,
And gaze upon her smile;
Seem as you drank the very air
Her breath perfumed the while:
