Cool poems
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Empty Pitchforks
© Thomas Lux
“There was poverty before money.”
There was debtors’ prison before inmates,
there was hunger prefossil,
In The Orchard
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
LEAVE go my hands, let me catch breath and see;
Let the dew-fall drench either side of me;
Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon
Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree;
Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.
The Awakening Of Dermuid
© Austin Clarke
IN the sleepy forest where the bluebells
Smouldered dimly through the night,
The Wild Swans at Coole
© William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The Weather-Prophet
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
A Fable.
"WHAT can the matter be with the thermometer?
Is it the sun or the moon or the comet, or
Something broke loose in the old earth's pedometer?"
The Mariner's Cave
© Jean Ingelow
Once on a time there walked a mariner,
That had been shipwrecked;-on a lonely shore,
And the green water made a restless stir,
And a great flock of mews sped on before.
He had nor food nor shelter, for the tide
Rose on the one, and cliffs on the other side.
Duke
© Richard Jones
He was hit back of the head for a haul of $15,
a Diner’s Club Card and picture of his daughter in a helmet
on a horse tethered to a pole that centered
its revolving universe. Pacing the halls, he’d ask
Our Valley
© Philip Levine
We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
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.
The Instruction Manual
© John Ashbery
As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
Papyrus
© Eamon Grennan
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Clouds
© Madison Julius Cawein
All through the tepid Summer night
The starless sky had poured a cool
Monotony of pleasant rain
In music beautiful.
Bathsheba's Song
© George Peele
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair.
Deola Thinking
© Cesare Pavese
Deola passes her mornings sitting in a cafe,
and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work,
Caliban upon Setebos
© Robert Browning
'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
The Princess (part 4)
© Alfred Tennyson
But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and entered in,
There leaning deep in broidered down we sank
Our elbows: on a tripod in the midst
A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.
Assurance
© Emma Lazarus
Last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss
Still floated on my lips. For we had strayed
The Gumsucker's Dirge
© Joseph Furphy
Sing the evil days we see, and the worse that are to be,
In such doggerel as dejection will allow,
We are pilgrims, sorrow-led, with no Beulah on ahead,
No elysian Up the Country for us now.
