Dreams poems
/ page 141 of 232 /The Poet at Seventeen
© Larry Levis
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
To My Mother
© Hristo Botev
Was it you, mother, with your tearful song,
was it you who cursed me three years' long
to be a luckless, drifting waif
and meet all those my soul most hates?
Plaint Of The Missouri 'Coon In The Berlin Zoological Gardens
© Eugene Field
Friend, by the way you hump yourself you're from the States, I know,
And born in old Mizzourah, where the 'coons in plenty grow;
My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
© Robert Lowell
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.
A Winter Piece
© William Cullen Bryant
The time has been that these wild solitudes,
Yet beautiful as wild, were trod by me
Oftener than now; and when the ills of life
Had chafed my spirit--when the unsteady pulse
The Mirror
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I
Where is all the beauty that hath been?
Where the bloom?
Dust on boundless wind? Grass dropt into fire?
Dulce et Decorum Est
© Wilfred Owen
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
Song In March
© William Gilmore Simms
NOW are the winds about us in their glee,
Tossing the slender tree;
The Dole Of Jarl Thorkell
© John Greenleaf Whittier
THE land was pale with famine
And racked with fever-pain;
The frozen fiords were fishless,
The earth withheld her grain.
A Dream
© Thomas Parnell
& then With raptures in her mouth she fled
the Cloud (for on a cloud she seemd to tread)
its curles unfolded & around her spread
My downy rest the warmth of fancy broke
& when my thoughts grew settled thus I spoke
Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur
© Alfred Tennyson
That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,
First made and latest left of all the knights,
Told, when the man was no more than a voice
In the white winter of his age, to those
With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.
Paeans
© Virna Sheard
Oh! I will hold fast to Joy!
I will not let him depart--
He shall close his beautiful rainbow wings
And sing his song in my heart.
The Foot-Path
© James Russell Lowell
It mounts athwart the windy hill
Through sallow slopes of upland bare,
And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still
Its narrowing curves that end in air.
The Ghost in the Martini
© Anthony Evan Hecht
Over the rim of the glass
Containing a good martini with a twist
I eye her bosom and consider a pass,
Certain we’d not be missed
Oppression
© Langston Hughes
Now dreams
Are not available
To the dreamers,
Nor songs
To the singers.
Nights on Planet Earth
© Louis Zukofsky
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the skyand a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very airis a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Australia To England
© John Farrell
What of the years of Englishmen?
What have they brought of growth and grace