Children poems
/ page 190 of 244 /
The Black Art
© Anne Sexton
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
The Bells
© Anne Sexton
Today the circus poster
is scabbing off the concrete wall
and the children have forgotten
if they knew at all.
The Refusal of Charon
© William Edmondstoune Aytoun
Why look the distant mountains
So gloomy and so drear?
The Dead Heart
© Anne Sexton
And I said, merely to myself, "I wish it could be for a
different seizure--as with Molly Bloom and her and
yes I said yes I will Yes."
The Children
© Anne Sexton
The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of dirty clothes,
Locked Doors
© Anne Sexton
I would like to unlock that door,
turn the rusty key
and hold each fallen one in my arms
but I cannot, I cannot.
I can only sit here on earth
at my place at the table.
The Witch's Life
© Anne Sexton
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
Mr. Mine
© Anne Sexton
Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is buiding a city, a city of flesh.
Flee On Your Donkey
© Anne Sexton
Today an intern knocks my knees,
testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack
on the stethoscope.
On The Death Of A Friend's Child
© James Russell Lowell
Death never came so nigh to me before,
Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused
Doors, Doors, Doors
© Anne Sexton
Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.
Oh! Mr. Malthus!
© Stephen Leacock
Turn back to Malthus as he walked o'er English Fields and Downs
And walked at night the crooked Streets of crooked English Towns,
Lifeless, undying, Shade or Man, as one that could not die
A hundred years his Shadow fell, a hundred Years to lie,
The Shadow on the Window Pane when Malthus' Ghost went by.
Why Negroes Don't Unite
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
Why of all the many races in the country where we live,
Do we find so little union as the Negro race can give?
Is it lack of love? or color? who will give the reason true,
Why they cherish opposition more than other peoples do?
The Death Baby
© Anne Sexton
I was an ice baby.
I turned to sky blue.
My tears became two glass beads.
My mouth stiffened into a dumb howl.
They say it was a dream
but I remember that hardening.
Invocation
© Alfred Austin
Where Apennine slopes unto Tuscan plain,
And breaks into dimples, and laughs to flowers,
To see where the terrors of Winter wane,
And out of a valley of grape and grain
There blossoms a City of domes and towers,
Ghosts
© Anne Sexton
Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.
England's Answer
© Rudyard Kipling
Truly ye come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban;
Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man.
Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;
Stark as your sons shall be - stern as your fathers were.
Barefoot
© Anne Sexton
Loving me with my shows off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
For My Lover, Returning To His Wife
© Anne Sexton
She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
