Future poems
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So Let Us Dare
© Ivan Donn Carswell
How do we discover an antidote to each other,
a faculty to commune in spiteful space?
Our bleeding hearts and noxious farts
tie us in a hopeless chase to free this place
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.
The Hill Of Death
© Louisa Lawson
No downward path to death we go
Through no dark shades or valleys low,
But up and on oer rises bright
Toward the dawn of endless light.
No further slice of me
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Enduring an inguinal hernia repair can
drive you to despair, it is a monumental
nonsense; in my defence I hadnt lived
through one before, couldnt be sure
Moocooboola Dam
© Ivan Donn Carswell
For more than a billion years weve been
nearly out of water; sincerely, a need repeatedly
exposed in calamitous reports of the tragic-comic sort
glibly cognising a collective we as the principle cause
Jessie of Gibraltar
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Our lives were founded on this rock, this Jessie of Gibraltar
Whose unfailing love endured beyond her ample nursing,
And we grew out of a rich and favoured childhood aware
Her powers were real (we tested them enough to know their soundness) into
I cannot let the moment pass
© Ivan Donn Carswell
I cannot let the moment pass without a weary greeting,
or retard the recent past where shadows still are fleeting,
Id sabotage the future by just staring in a mirror
and never let the glimmer pass and try to hold my image fast
Stoves and sunshine
© Eugene Field
Prate, ye who will, of so-called charms you find across the sea-
The land of stoves and sunshine is good enough for me!
I've done the grand for fourteen months in every foreign clime,
And I've learned a heap of learning, but I've shivered all the time;
And the biggest bit of wisdom I've acquired-as I can see-
Is that which teaches that this land's the land of lands for me.
Futurelessness
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.
A monument in words
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Perhaps they cant compete these dry and dusty counters
of the grains of sand, theres more evoked within a ball of
dimpled clay on any day a sculptor lends his hands to shape
a face; I am pleased to read the poet rather than the man
and will not place my future faith in such abstruse scatology.
© I.D. Carswell
I Leave Thee for Awhile
© Eliza Cook
I leave thee for awhile, my love, I leave thee with a sigh;
The fountain spring within my soul is playing in mine eye;
I do not blush to own the tear,--let, let it touch my cheek,
And what my lip has failed to tell, that drop perchance may speak.
Mavourneen! when again I seek my green isle in the West,
Oh, promise thou wilt share my lot, and set this heart at rest.
The Bastille: A Vision
© Helen Maria Williams
"Drear cell! along whose lonely bounds,
Unvisited by light,
Chill silence dwells with night,
Save where the clanging fetter sounds!
Verses III
© Charlotte Turner Smith
Written by the same lady on seeing her two sons
at play.
SWEET age of bless'd delusion! blooming boys,
Ah! revel long in childhood's thoughtless joys,
With light and pliant spirits, that can stoop
To follow, sportively, the rolling hoop;
The World is with Me
© Thomas Hood
The world is with me, and its many cares,
Its woes--its wants--the anxious hopes and fears
That wait on all terrestrial affairs--
The shades of former and of future years--
A Hero
© Katharine Tynan
He was so foolish, the poor lad,
He made superior people smile
Who knew not of the wings he had
Budding and growing all the while;
Nor that the laurel wreath was made
Already for his curly head.
The House Of Dust: Part 02: 08: The Box With Silver Handles
© Conrad Aiken
Well,it was two days after my husband died
Two days! And the earth still raw above him.
And I was sweeping the carpet in their hall.
In number fourthe room with the red wall-paper
The House Of Dust: Part 02: 04: Nightmare
© Conrad Aiken
I sit before the gold-embroidered curtain
And think her face is like a wrinkled desert.
The crystal burns in lamplight beneath my eyes.
A dragon slowly coils on the scaly curtain.
Upon a scarlet cloth a white skull lies.
The House Of Dust: Complete (Long)
© Conrad Aiken
. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . . I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode called "The Screen Maiden"
in Part II.
Pink Dominoes
© Rudyard Kipling
"They are fools who kiss and tell" -
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.
A Letter From Li Po
© Conrad Aiken
Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
announces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
