Children poems
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Golden State
© Frank Bidart
I
To see my father
lying in pink velvet, a rosary
twined around his hands, rouged,
Bindweed by James McKean: American Life in Poetry #62 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Gardeners who've fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in the poem. It's an endless struggle, and in the end, of course, the bindweed wins.
The Sparrow's Fall
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
And lifted the gloomy shadows
That overspread my life,
And flooding my home with gladness,
Made me a happy wife.
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
Because I could not stop for Death (479)
© Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
Advice to Her Son on Marriage
© Mary Barber
from The Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr C
When you gain her Affection, take care to preserve it;
The Magyar's New-Year-Eve
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
By Temèsvar I hear the clarions call:
The year dies. Let it die. It lived in vain.
Gun booms to gun along the looming wall,
Another year advances o'er the plain.
The Despot hails it from his bannered keep:
Ah, Tyrant, is it well to break a bondsman's sleep?
Hotel Lautréamont
© John Ashbery
1.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”
The Mob
© Ada Cambridge
And not ear listens to the warning call.
No eye awakes to see the portent dread.
Must brute force reign and social order fall
Ere these starved millions can be clothed and fed?
A strange phenomenon, this unconcern-
To live so fast and be so slow to learn!
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
Jadis - Prologue
© Paul Verlaine
Off, be off, now, graceless pack:
Get you gone, lost children mine:
Your release is earned in fine:
The Chimaera lends her back.
Whole Duty Of Children
© Robert Louis Stevenson
A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
Jenny
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It was a careless life I led
When rooms like this were scarce so strange
Not long ago. What breeds the change,
The many aims or the few years?
Because to-night it all appears
Something I do not know again.
