Cool poems
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from Omeros
© Derek Walcott
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
Hot Sun, Cool Fire
© George Peele
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair.
Green Leaves And Sere
© Mathilde Blind
Three tall poplars beside the pool
Shiver and moan in the gusty blast,
The carded clouds are blown like wool,
And the yellowing leaves fly thick and fast.
The Bath
© Gary Snyder
Fire inside and boiling water on the stove
We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches
wrap the babies, step outside,
Lyell’s Hypothesis Again
© Kenneth Rexroth
An Attempt to Explain the Former
Changes of the Earth's Surface by
Causes Now in Operation
Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
It's two in the mornin' on Saturday night
At Rosalie's Good Eats Café.
Convict Once - Part First.
© James Brunton Stephens
I.
FREE again! Free again! eastward and westward, before me, behind me,
Wide lies Australia! and free are my feet, as my soul is, to roam!
Oh joy unwonted of space undetermined! No limit assigned me!
Freedom conditioned by nought save the need and desire of a home!
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Ghazal
© Agha Shahid Ali
Feel the patient’s heart
Pounding—oh please, this once—
—JAMES MERRILL
I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.
A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.
Absolution
© Edith Nesbit
He stood beside her, young and strong, and swayed
With pity for the sorrow in her eyes--
Which, as she raised them to his own, conveyed
Into his soul a sort of sad surprise--
Landscape, Dense with Trees
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
When you move away, you see how much depends
on the pace of the days—how much
I Am In Need Of Music
© Elizabeth Bishop
There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.
Signs
© Larry Levis
2.
And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone.
Mists In Autumn
© James Thomson
Now, by the cool, declining year condescend,
Descend the copious exhalations, check'd,
As up the middle sky unseen they stole,
And roll the doubling fogs around the hill.
Questions Of Life
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A bending staff I would not break,
A feeble faith I would not shake,
Nor even rashly pluck away
The error which some truth may stay,
Whose loss might leave the soul without
A shield against the shafts of doubt.
The Shipwreck Of Idomeneus
© George Meredith
Amid the din of elemental strife,
No voice may pierce but Deity supreme:
And Deity supreme alone can hear,
Above the hurricane's discordant shrieks,
The cry of agonized humanity.
The Dance
© Gary Snyder
“Against its will, energy is doing something productive, like the devil in medieval history. The principle is that nature does something against its own will and, by self-entanglement, produces beauty.” Otto Rössler
Izanami
