Family poems
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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?
There Was A Child Went Forth
© Walt Whitman
THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
Fragments Of A Lost Gnostic Poem Of The Twelfth Century
© Herman Melville
Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
Birth Story -- English Translation
© Rabindranath Tagore
The kid asks his mum,
From where did I come,
Interrupted Meditation
© Robert Hass
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.
And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone
Creole
© Robert Pinsky
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Bears at Raspberry Time
© Hayden Carruth
Fear. Three bears
are not fear, mother
and cubs come berrying
in our neighborhood
Candles
© Sylvia Plath
They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore
Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen
© William Stanley Merwin
He that had come that morning,
One after the other,
Over seven hills,
Each of a new color,
Chamber Thicket
© Sharon Olds
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
The Garden Buddha by Peter Pereira: American Life in Poetry #132 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Children at play give personalities to lifeless objects, and we don't need to give up that pleasure as we grow older. Poets are good at discerning life within what otherwise might seem lifeless. Here the poet Peter Pereira, a family physician in the Seattle area, contemplates a smiling statue, and in that moment of contemplation the smile is given by the statue to the man.
The Garden Buddha
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distanceâalways
A Man in Blue
© James Schuyler
Under the French horns of a November afternoon
a man in blue is raking leaves
Essay on Psychiatrists
© Robert Pinsky
It's crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
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.
Landscape, Dense with Trees
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
When you move away, you see how much depends
on the pace of the days—how much
