Children poems
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The Stones
© Sylvia Plath
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle
The Animals are Leaving by Charles Harper Webb: American Life in Poetry #203 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet L
© Ted Kooser
To read in the news that a platoon of soldiers has been killed is a terrible thing, but to learn the name of just one of them makes the news even more vivid and sad. To hold the name of someone or something on our lips is a powerful thing. It is the badge of individuality and separateness. Charles Harper Webb, a California poet, takes advantage of the power of naming in this poem about the steady extinction of animal species.
The Animals are Leaving
One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.
A Ballad Of Suicide
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbourson the wall
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
Life Returning
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
O LIFE, dear life, with sunbeam finger touching
This poor damp brow, or flying freshly by
On wings of mountain wind, or tenderly
In links of visionary embraces clutching
Me from the yawning grave--
Can I believe thou yet hast power to save?
To His Two Children
© Li Po
In the land of Wu the mulberry leaves are green,
And thrice the silkworms have gone to sleep.
In East Luh where my family stay,
I wonder who is sowing those fields of ours.
Sittin' On The Porch
© Edgar Albert Guest
Sittin' on the porch at night when all the tasks are done,
Just restin' there an' talkin', with my easy slippers on,
An' my shirt band thrown wide open an' my feet upon the rail,
Oh, it's then I'm at my richest, with a wealth that cannot fail;
For the scent of early roses seems to flood the evening air,
An' a throne of downright gladness is my wicker rocking chair.
The Free Selector (song of 1861)
© Anonymous
Ye sons of industry, to you I belong,
And to you I would dedicate a verse or a song.
Rejoicing o'er the victory John Robertson has won
Now the Land Bill has passed and the good time has come.
Now the Land Bill, etc.
Madam And Her Madam
© Langston Hughes
I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
The Negro Mother
© Langston Hughes
Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I'm reaching the goal.
Hymn of the Waldenses
© William Cullen Bryant
Hear, Father, hear thy faint afflicted flock
Cry to thee, from the desert and the rock;
While those, who seek to slay thy children, hold
Blasphemous worship under roofs of gold;
And the broad goodly lands, with pleasant airs
That nurse the grape and wave the grain, are theirs.
On The Porch At The Frost Place, Franconia, N. H.
© William Matthews
So here the great man stood,
fermenting malice and poems
we have to be nearly as fierce
against ourselves as he
Mingus At The Showplace
© William Matthews
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen
and so I swung into action and wrote a poemand it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience shatliterature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar,casting beer money from a reel of ones,
Dire Cure
© William Matthews
"First, do no harm," the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalous
Ambition
© Aline Murray Kilmer
Kenton and Deborah, Michael and Rose,
These are fine children as all the world knows,
But into my arms in my dreams every night
Come Peter and Christopher, Faith and Delight.
Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War
© Margaret Atwood
Maybe there's something in all of this
I missed. But if it's selfless
love you're looking for,
you've got the wrong goddess.
The Shadow Voice
© Margaret Atwood
Isn't the moon warm
enough for you
why do you need
the blanket of another body
A Sad Child
© Margaret Atwood
You're sad because you're sad.
It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.
