Cool poems
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Hymn to Life
© James Schuyler
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Between Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night
© Roddy Lumsden
Just then, encountering my ruddy face
in the grand piano's cold black craquelure,
Abandoned Ranch, Big Bend
© Hayden Carruth
Three people come where no people belong any more.
They are a woman who would be young
Eclogue 5: Menalcas Mopsus
© Publius Vergilius Maro
MENALCAS
Why, Mopsus, being both together met,
You skilled to breathe upon the slender reeds,
I to sing ditties, do we not sit down
Here where the elm-trees and the hazels blend?
The Mountain Cemetery
© Edgar Bowers
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.
Decline and Fall
© Daniel Nester
Cornice rose in ranges, rose so high
It saw no sky, that forum, but noon sky.
Marble shone like shallows; columns too
Streamed with cool light as rocks in breakers do.
Portrait of a Figure near Water
© Jane Kenyon
Rebuked, she turned and ran
uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner
arsonist, held a match to her brain.
She observed her life: against her will
it survived the unwavering flame.
Intimations Of The Beautiful
© Madison Julius Cawein
The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.
Oh Lovely Rock
© Robinson Jeffers
We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
To a Young Lady, With Some Lampreys
© John Gay
With lovers, twas of old the fashion
By presents to convey their passion;
Winter
© John Le Gay Brereton
When winter chills your aged bones
As by the fire you sit and nod,
Youll hear a passing wind that moans,
And think of one beneath the sod.
Randall Jarrell
© Robert Lowell
The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,
slats of dust distracted by a downdraw;
Despair
© Edith Nesbit
SMILE on me, mouth of red--so much too red,
Shine on me, eyes which darkened lashes shade,
Remarks Of Increase D. O'phace, Esquire
© James Russell Lowell
At An Extrumpery Caucus In State Street, Reported By Mr. H. Biglow
No? Hez he? He haint, though? Wut? Voted agin him?
The Owl And The Lark
© Alfred Austin
A grizzled owl at midnight moped
Where thick the ivy glistened;
So I, who long have vainly groped
For wisdom, leaned and listened.
Pauline, A Fragment of a Question
© Robert Browning
And I can love nothing-and this dull truth
Has come the last: but sense supplies a love
Encircling me and mingling with my life.
The Camp Of Souls
© Isabella Valancy Crawford
My white canoe, like the silvery air
O'er the River of Death that darkly rolls
When the moons of the world are round and fair,
I paddle back from the "Camp of Souls."
