Children poems
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The Pit
© John Fuller
From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles,
The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last
Riot of the senses, is only a short pass.
Earth to be forked over is more patient,
Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner.
Le Jardin Des Tuileries
© Oscar Wilde
This winter air is keen and cold,
And keen and cold this winter sun,
But round my chair the children run
Like little things of dancing gold.
Tone's Grave
© Thomas Osborne Davis
In Bodenstown Churchyard there is a green grave,
And wildly along it the winter winds rave;
Small shelter, I ween, are the ruined walls there,
When the storm sweeps down on the plains of Kildare.
Between the Wars
© Robert Hass
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—
midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,
Caroline Chisholm
© Henry Kendall
THE PRIESTS and the Levites went forth, to feast at the courts of the Kings;
They were vain of their greatness and worth, and gladdened with glittering things;
They were fair in the favour of gold, and they walked on, with delicate feet,
Where, famished and faint with the cold, the women fell down in the street.
To One Of The Author's Children
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
THOU wak'st from happy sleep to play
With bounding heart, my boy!
Before thee lies a long bright day
Of summer and of joy.
1994
© Paul Celan
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year
when a thumb of ice
stamped itself hard near my heart
From Laughter To Labor
© Edgar Albert Guest
We have wandered afar in our hunting for pleasure,
We have scorned the soul's duty to gather up treasure;
We have lived for our laughter and toiled for our winning
And paid little heed to the soul's simple sinning.
But light were the burdens that freighted us then,
God and country, to-day let us prove we are men!
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
© Walt Whitman
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
A New York Child’s Garden of Verses
© Edwin Morgan
In winter I get up at night,
And dress by an electric light.
In summer, autumn, ay, and spring,
I have to do the self-same thing.
Coole Park 1929
© William Butler Yeats
I MEDITATE upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
The Alpaca
© Jim Carroll
She is harnessed for a long journey; on her back she carries an entire store of wool.
She walks without rest, and sees with eyes full of strangeness. The wool merchant has forgotten to come to get her, and she is ready.
In this world, nothing comes better equipped than the alpaca; ones is more burdened with rags than the next. Her sky-high softness is such that if a newborn is placed on her back, he will not feel a bone of the animal.
The weather is very hot. Today, large scissors that will cut and cut represent mercy for the alpaca.
A Summer Garden
© Louise Gluck
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
Woodland Rain
© Bliss William Carman
SHINING, shining children
Of the summer rain,
Racing down the valley,
Sweeping o'er the plain!
from The Bridge: The Tunnel
© Hart Crane
Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;
A walk is better underneath the L a brisk
Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself
Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—
As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:
The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
The Bounty
© Derek Walcott
Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto
