God poems
/ page 107 of 194 /
Cleanliness
© Charles Lamb
All-endearing Cleanliness,
Virtue next to Godliness,
Easiest, cheapest, needful'st duty,
To the body health and beauty,
Who that's human would refuse it,
When a little water does it?
Sapphics
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
Cynthia's Revels: Queen and huntress, chaste and fair
© Benjamin Jonson
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 96
© Alfred Tennyson
You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
Satire III
© John Donne
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
Paradise Lost: Book X
© Patrick Kavanagh
So having said, he thus to Eve in few:
"Say, Woman, what is this which thou hast done?"
To whom sad Eve, with shame nigh overwhelm'd,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abash'd replied,
"The Serpent me beguil'd, and I did eat."
Burning Island
© Gary Snyder
O Wave God who broke through me today
Sea Bream
massive pink and silver
cool swimming down with me watching
staying away from the spear
Encounter in the Local Pub
© Hugo Williams
Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
Étude Réaliste
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
(excerpt)
I
A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink,
Might tempt, should heaven see meet,
An angel's lips to kiss, we think,
A baby's feet.
Symphony of a Mexican Garden
© Grace Hazard Conkling
But all across the trudging ragged chords
That are the tangled grasses in the heat,
The mariposa lilies fluttering
Like trills upon some archangelic flute,
To James Fenton
© John Fuller
The poet’s duties: no need to stress
The subject’s dullness, nonetheless
Here’s an incestuous address
In Robert Burns’ style
To one whom all the Muses bless
At Great Turnstile.
from Totem Poem [Abandoned in a field near Yass]
© Luke Davies
Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm
and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness,
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
© Jack Spicer
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
