Children poems
/ page 223 of 244 /
The Future
© Leonard Cohen
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it's lonely here,
there's no one left to torture
Suzanne
© Leonard Cohen
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
Dance Me To The End Of Love
© Leonard Cohen
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Villages and Plains the Streams Flow Through
© Jonas Mekas
to carry on the songs of washerwomen,
fishermen's nets and grey wooden bridges.
Clear blue nights, smelling warm,
streams of thin mist off the meadow drift in
with distinct hoof-stomps from a fettered horse.
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees
© Amy Clampitt
The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived,
impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of
The Fairy Temple; Or, Oberon's Chapel
© Robert Herrick
RARE TEMPLES THOU HAST SEEN, I KNOW,
AND RICH FOR IN AND OUTWARD SHOW;
SURVEY THIS CHAPEL BUILT, ALONE,
WITHOUT OR LIME, OR WOOD, OR STONE.
THEN SAY, IF ONE THOU'ST SEEN MORE FINE
THAN THIS, THE FAIRIES' ONCE, NOW THINE.
Men Mind No State In Sickness
© Robert Herrick
That flow of gallants which approach
To kiss thy hand from out the coach;
That fleet of lackeys which do run
Before thy swift postilion;
California Plush
© Frank Bidart
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
They Will Say
© Carl Sandburg
OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
Theme In Yellow
© Carl Sandburg
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
The Sins of Kalamazoo
© Carl Sandburg
THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
The Mayor of Gary
© Carl Sandburg
I ASKED the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States.
Go into the plants and you will see men sitting around doing nothingmachinery does everything, said the Mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was easy and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners.
The Hangman at Home
© Carl Sandburg
WHAT does the hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a
The Four Brothers
© Carl Sandburg
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Testament
© Carl Sandburg
I GIVE the undertakers permission to haul my body
to the graveyard and to lay away all, the head, the
feet, the hands, all: I know there is something left
over they can not put away.
Streets Too Old
© Carl Sandburg
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.
How old, how old, how old, we are:the walls went on saying, street walls leaning toward each other like old women of the people, like old midwives tired and only doing what must be done.
The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of kingsancient bearded kings who wrote books and spoke of Gods love for all peopleand young kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers splitting the heads of their opponents and enlarging their kingdoms.
Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was the murmur always whistling on the winds twisting out of the armpits and fingertips of the kings in bronze:Is there no loosening? Is this for always?
In an early snowflurry one cried:Pull me down where the tired old midwives no longer look at me, throw the bronze of me to a fierce fire and make me into neckchains for dancing children.
Smoke
© Carl Sandburg
I SIT in a chair and read the newspapers.
Millions of men go to war, acres of them are buried, guns and ships broken, cities burned, villages sent up in smoke, and children where cows are killed off amid hoarse barbecues vanish like finger-rings of smoke in a north wind.
I sit in a chair and read the newspapers.
Shenandoah
© Carl Sandburg
IN the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider blue, and the sun on the riders wondering.
Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray, piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take children done with play.
The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers, its all old and old nowadays in the Shenandoah.. . .
And all is young, a butter of dandelions slung on the turf, climbing blue flowers of the wishing woodlands wondering: a midnight purple violet claims the sun among old heads, among old dreams of repeating heads of a rider blue and a rider gray in the Shenandoah.
Sheep
© Carl Sandburg
Thousands of sheep, soft-footed, black-nosed sheep--
one by one going up the hill and over the fence--one by
one four-footed pattering up and over--one by one wiggling
their stub tails as they take the short jump and go
Prairie
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
