Future poems
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Oh Future! thou secreted peace
© Emily Dickinson
Oh Future! thou secreted peace
Or subterranean woe --
Is there no wandering route of grace
That leads away from thee --
No Brigadier throughout the Year
© Emily Dickinson
No Brigadier throughout the Year
So civic as the Jay --
A Neighbor and a Warrior too
With shrill felicity
No Bobolink -- reverse His Singing
© Emily Dickinson
No Bobolink -- reverse His Singing
When the only Tree
Ever He minded occupying
By the Farmer be --
A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be
© Emily Dickinson
A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be --
Sunrise -- Hast thou a Flag for me?
At Midnight, I am but a Maid,
How short it takes to make a Bride --
Then -- Midnight, I have passed from thee
Unto the East, and Victory --
There is a finished feeling
© Emily Dickinson
There is a finished feeling
Experienced at Graves --
A leisure of the Future --
A Wilderness of Size.
Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
© Emily Dickinson
Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- or if there were
A time when it was not --
Burning the Doll
© Cecilia Woloch
Father, this was our deepest confession of love.
I didn't watch the plastic body melt
to soft flesh in the flames "
I watched you move from the house to the fire.
I would have given you anything.
Nero's Term
© Constantine Cavafy
Now he will return to Rome slightly tired,
but delightfully tired from this journey,
full of days of enjoyment --
at the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia...
evenings at cities of Achaia...
Ah the delight of nude bodies, above all...
But Wise Men Perceive Approaching Things
© Constantine Cavafy
Men know what is happening now.
The gods know the things of the future,
the full and sole possessors of all lights.
Of the future things, wise men perceive
approaching things. Their hearing
Candles
© Constantine Cavafy
The days of our future stand in front of us
like a row of little lit candles --
golden, warm, and lively little candles.
Choose your obsessions...
© Siddharth Anand
Choose your obsessions
For they are unworthy possessions;
They are the weeds,
You; yourself choose to grow.
Some seeds are rotten..
Still you keep them, them, you dont throw.
Further Instructions
© Ezra Pound
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs,
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about the streets, You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.
Isaac and Archibald
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Isaac and Archibald were two old men.
I knew them, and I may have laughed at them
A little; but I must have honored them
For they were old, and they were good to me.
Flammonde
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
The man Flammonde, from God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air
With news of nations in his talk
And something royal in his walk,
Aunt Imogen
© Edwin Arlington Robinson
Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore
The childrenJane, Sylvester, and Young George
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world,
Reservations Confirmed
© Charles Webb
The ticket settles on my desk: a paper tongue
pronouncing "Go away;" a flattened seed
from which a thousand-mile leap through the air can grow.
1819 New Year's Carrier's Address
© Major Henry Livingston, Jr.
Believe me, dear patrons, I have wand'red too far,
Without any compass, or planet or star;
My dear native village I scarcely can see
So I'll hie to my hive like the tempest-tost bee.
For John Clare
© John Ashbery
Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet andsalutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.
There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.
It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.
Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon
© Vernon Scannell
The unrelated paragraphs of morning
Are forgotten now; the severed heads of kings
Rot by the misty Thames; the roses of York
And Lancaster are pressed between the leaves
Elizabeth Leaves A Letter For Dr. Frankenstein
© Jennifer Reeser
Whether the clouds had abandoned Geneva that evening
no one can say now, but what I remember are roses
bruised at their edges, and china cups yellowed with age.
I am too sick of interior vapors, I told you,
