Family poems
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The Other
© Anne Sexton
Under my bowels, yellow with smoke,
it waits.
Under my eyes, those milk bunnies,
it waits.
Doors, Doors, Doors
© Anne Sexton
Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.
Clothes
© Anne Sexton
The hat I was married in,
will it do?
White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array.
It's old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug,
but is suits to die in something nostalgic.
Christmas Eve
© Anne Sexton
Oh sharp diamond, my mother!
I could not count the cost
of all your faces, your moods--
that present that I lost.
He Had So Much Work To Do
© Henry Lawson
Jim was trucking for a sawmill to make money for the home,
He was making, out of Mudgee, for the family to come,
And a load-chain snapped the switch-bar, and Black Anderson found Jim,
In the morning, in a creek-bed, with a log on top of him.
Sailing Home From Rapallo
© Robert Lowell
[February 1954]
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....
The Ring And The Book - Chapter VIII - Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis
© Robert Browning
(Virgil, now, should not be too difficult
To Cinoncino,say the early books . . .
Pen, truce to further gambols! Poscimur!)
Refrigerator, 1957
© Thomas Lux
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
Improved Farm Land
© Carl Sandburg
Tall timber stood here once, here on a corn belt farm along the Monon.
Here the roots of a half-mile of trees dug their runners deep in the loam for a grip and a hold against wind storms.
Then the axemen came and the chips flew to the zing of steel and handle-the lank railsplitters cut the big ones first, the beeches and the oaks, then the brush.
Dynamite, wagons, and horses took the stumps-the plows sunk their teeth in-now it is first class corn land-improved property-and the hogs grunt over the fodder crops.
It would come hard now for this half mile of improved farm land along the Monon corn belt, on a piece of Grand Prairie, to remember once it had a great singing family of trees.
The duel
© Eugene Field
The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
Boris Godunov
© Alexander Pushkin
Boyars, The People, Inspectors, Officers, Attendants, Guests,
a Boy in attendance on Prince Shuisky, a Catholic Priest, a
Polish Noble, a Poet, an Idiot, a Beggar, Gentlemen, Peasants,
Guards, Russian, Polish, and German Soldiers, a Russian
Prisoner of War, Boys, an old Woman, Ladies, Serving-women.
Her News
© Hugo Williams
You paused for a moment and I heard you smoking
on the other end of the line.
I pictured your expression,
one eye screwed shut against the smoke
Tortoise Family Connections
© David Herbert Lawrence
On he goes, the little one,
Bud of the universe,
Pediment of life.
Setting off somewhere, apparently.
Whither away, brisk egg?
The Witch's Frolic
© Richard Harris Barham
Thou mayest have read, my little boy Ned,
Though thy mother thine idlesse blames,
In Doctor Goldsmith's history book,
Of a gentleman called King James,
In quilted doublet, and great trunk breeches,
Who held in abhorrence tobacco and witches.
Henry Tripp
© Edgar Lee Masters
The bank broke and I lost my savings.
I was sick of the tiresome game in Spoon River
And I made up my mind to run away
And leave my place in life and my family;
Clarence Fawcett
© Edgar Lee Masters
The sudden death of Eugene Carman
Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month,
And I told my wife and children that night.
But it didn't come, and so I thought
