Future poems
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Reflections - I.
© Samuel Rogers
Man to the last is but a froward child;
So eager for the future, come what may,
And to the present so insensible!
Oh, if he could in all things as he would,
Airs and Angels: This Night Only
© Kenneth Rexroth
[Erik Satie: "Gymnopédie #1"]
Moonlight now on Malibu
Kaddish
© Allen Ginsberg
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!
Valedictory
© Aldous Huxley
And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare,
My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;
And the question rumbles in the void:
Was she aware, was she after all aware?
The Unknown Eros. Book I.
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
The Prediction
© Mark Strand
That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,
a young woman walked, and for an instant
Marys Wedding
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
The future I read in toil's guerdon,
You will read in your children's eyes:
The past--the same past with either--
Is to you a delightsome scene,
But I cannot trace it clearly
For the graves that rise between.
To the Poor
© Bliss William Carman
Child of distress, who meet’st the bitter scorn
Of fellow-men to happier prospects born,
Turning Forty
© Jonathan Galassi
The barroom mirror lit up with our wives
has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills
Japanese subcompact, little lives
asleep behind us, heading for the hills
The Empty Glass
© Louise Gluck
I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.
Lines On The Death Of S. Oliver Torrey
© John Greenleaf Whittier
SECRETARY OF THE BOSTON YOUNG MEN'S ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.
Gone before us, O our brother,
Sonnet: On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When they did greet me Father, sudden Awe
Weigh'd down my spirit! I retired and knelt
White Water
© Eamon Grennan
Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be
indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata
for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock
shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes
and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all
is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.
The Knight's Epitaph
© William Cullen Bryant
This is the church which Pisa, great and free,
Reared to St. Catharine. How the time-stained walls,
Walking Parker Home
© Bob Kaufman
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/
A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night
© Henry Timrod
Oh! dost thou flatter falsely, Hope?
The day hath scarcely passed that saw thy birth,
A Woman on the Dump
© Debora Greger
Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump?
—Wallace Stevens
Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing,
the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread,
from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely
into these hollowed grounds,
