Fear poems
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How I Consulted The Oracle Of The Goldfishes
© James Russell Lowell
What know we of the world immense
Beyond the narrow ring of sense?
Grandmothers Teaching
© Alfred Austin
``Grandmother dear, you do not know; you have lived the old-world life,
Under the twittering eaves of home, sheltered from storm and strife;
Rocking cradles, and covering jams, knitting socks for baby feet,
Or piecing together lavender bags for keeping the linen sweet:
Daughter, wife, and mother in turn, and each with a blameless breast,
Then saying your prayers when the nightfall came, and quietly dropping to rest.
Juliet After The Masquerade. By Thompson
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
SHE left the festival, for it seem'd dim
Now that her eye no longer dwelt on him,
Your Voices Joined Is All It Takes
© Ivan Donn Carswell
They came in masted wooden ships across
an unindentured sea and cast their lot in ocean
swells to chance at history, and Sovereign power
commanded thus they rot in purgatory.
Your noble reign
© Ivan Donn Carswell
The man whose term we would remember as our longest,
constant serving Head of State, besides the late Sir Robert
Gordon Menzies, turned 67 yesterday. Congratulations John,
youve run a long and torrid race, kept up a frenzied pace
What does it take?
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Is the current rate of global warming
a serious and cogent warning?
Do we need to think about the fact
that higher tides will drown Pacific island states
What a weekend
© Ivan Donn Carswell
What a weekend, it certainly defied all the pundits trends,
the World Game French were trashed by Versace and petulance,
the Wallabies by a graphic haka, while Wimbledon saw the Amazons
revenge and Switzerlands answer was Roger Federer in eminence.
Travelling on the thumb
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Travelling on the thumb, it wasnt hard to do, you took
the rides that you could get with no regrets let shrinkage
in the mileage to your goal provide your measures of success,
strode the grassy verges thumb erect and cursed the surly
To win a game
© Ivan Donn Carswell
How do you win a football game? Not by skill alone or clever plays,
in modern days the game has changed and subterfuge and actors
ways will pave the path to glory. Fitness pays a fair reward to keep
a fleetness in the feet, a clearness in the head, and special food
Time to play
© Ivan Donn Carswell
It is a pristine page, clean on the blue screen
where I compose, I dont expect it to stay that way
as words glow from blunt, abused fingers, as insistent
sounds in my head translate into sentence structures,
The Hunt
© Ivan Donn Carswell
The hunt begins at a languid pace
belying hysteria building in place, biding its time
to menace the peace in an orchard where mayhems
scant held on a leash. Abigail Belles the first into line,
A Une Madone (To A Madonna)
© Charles Baudelaire
Ex-voto dans le goût espagnol
Je veux bâtir pour toi, Madone, ma maîtresse,
Un autel souterrain au fond de ma détresse,
Et creuser dans le coin le plus noir de mon coeur,
Tales in the beginning
© Ivan Donn Carswell
In the beginning that was all there was,
a new forged social unity of the self aware
in a community of need, a bare structure
to belie the complexities to come,
but it was where the tales all must have begun.
Fragment
© James Weldon Johnson
The hand of Fate cannot be stayed,
The course of Fate cannot be steered,
By all the gods that man has made,
Nor all the devils he has feared,
Not by the prayers that might be prayed
In all the temples he has reared.
To The Gad-Fly
© George Moses Horton
Majestic insect! from thy royal hum,
The flies retreat, or starve before they'll come;
The obedient plough-horse may, devoid of fear,
Perform his task with joy, when thou art near.
Shirley of Serendipity
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Where were you Shirley of the Sanguine Lake?
Where did you disappear? The echoes of your empty house
Were almost stilled yet held to soar the scheming rough
And quaver in a hollow fear. We raked the mirrored water's edge
To Roosevelt {2}
© Rubén Dario
It is with the voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman,
that I should come to you, Hunter,
primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with something of Washington and more of Nimrod.
Pedestrian ambitions
© Ivan Donn Carswell
My thoughts are like the boots randomly arrayed
in the rack outside the window, some in pairs neatly
stacked, comfortably worn with a relaxed air of
confidence, some scattered in patterns of bizarre
