Design poems
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Unholy Sonnet 1
© Mark Jarman
I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.
Some Assembly Required
© Sonia Sanchez
Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls
Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet
from Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax
© Andrew Marvell
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
Blue Ridge
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Up there on the mountain road, the fireworks
blistered and subsided, for once at eye level:
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
Sonnet: I Thank You
© Henry Timrod
I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
September Notebook: Stories
© Robert Hass
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
© Gwendolyn Brooks
He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat
Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat
And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.
Psalm 55
© Mary Sidney Herbert
My God, most glad to look, most prone to hear,
An open ear, oh, let my prayer find,
from Mercian Hymns
© Geoffrey Hill
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Paradise Lost: Book X
© Patrick Kavanagh
So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
"Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?"
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelm'd,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abash'd replied,
"The Serpent me beguil'd, and I did eat."
Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough
© Andrew Marvell
TO THE LORD FAIRFAX
See how the archèd earth does here
