Food poems
/ page 82 of 95 /
Hymn Of Man
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
In the grey beginning of years, in the twilight of things that began,
The word of the earth in the ears of the world, was it God? was it man?
The word of the earth to the spheres her sisters, the note of her song,
The sound of her speech in the ears of the starry and sisterly throng,
A New Year's Message To Joseph Mazzini
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Send the stars light, but send not love to me.
Shelley.IOut of the dawning heavens that hear
Young wings and feet of the new year
Move through their twilight, and shed round
Messidor
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Put in the sickles and reap;
For the morning of harvest is red,
And the long large ranks of the corn
Coloured and clothed as the morn
A Desolaltion
© Allen Ginsberg
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
The Cat in the Kitchen
© Robert Bly
Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.
Snowbirds
© Peter Conners
My maternal grandparents were snowbirds; the scent of their plumage an evergreen air freshener dangling off the rearview mirror of a Cadillac
Praying Drunk
© Andrew Hudgins
Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
The Clean Plater
© Ogden Nash
Some singers sing of ladies' eyes,
And some of ladies lips,
Refined ones praise their ladylike ways,
And course ones hymn their hips.
No Doctor's Today, Thank You
© Ogden Nash
They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful,
well, today I feel euphorian,
Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetitite of a
Victorian.
Look What You Did, Christopher!
© Ogden Nash
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Someone sailed the ocean blue.
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain
For a business trip on the bounding main,
Good-By Now or Pardon My Gauntlet
© Ogden Nash
Bring down the moon for genteel Janet;
She's too refined for this gross planet.
She wears garments and you wear clothes,
You buy stockings, she purchases hose.
Damascus, What Are You Doing to Me?
© Nizar Qabbani
3
I return to the womb in which I was formed . . .
To the first book I read in it . . .
To the first woman who taught me
The geography of love . . .
And the geography of women . . .
The Beggar
© John Newton
Encouraged by thy word
Of promise to the poor;
Behold, a beggar, Lord,
Waits at thy mercy's door!
No hand, no heart, O Lord, but thine,
Can help or pity wants like mine.
Little Fugue
© Sylvia Plath
The yew's black fingers wag:
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.
The Law Of The Jungle
© Rudyard Kipling
Now this is the Law of the Jungle - as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back -
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Rune of the Finland Woman
© Marilyn Hacker
She could bind the world's winds in a single strand.
She could find the world's words in a singing wind.
She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand.
She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind.
The Eve of Crecy
© William Morris
Gold on her head, and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet;
Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite.
The White Cliffs
© Alice Duer Miller
Yet I have loathed those voices when the sense
Of what they said seemed to me insolence,
As if the dominance of the whole nation
Lay in that clear correct enunciation.
The Lion and the Lamb
© Elinor Wylie
I saw a Tiger's golden flank,
I saw what food he ate,
By a desert spring he drank;
The Tiger's name was Hate.
