Great poems
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waiting on the mayflower
© Evie Shockley
“what, to the american slave, is your 4th of july?”
—frederick douglass
The Black-Faced Sheep
© Donald Hall
My grandfather spent all day searching the valley
and edges of Ragged Mountain,
calling “Ke-day!” as if he brought you salt,
“Ke-day! Ke-day!”
A Sculptor
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
As the ambitious sculptor, tireless, lifts
Chisel and hammer to the block at hand,
Before my half-formed character I stand
And ply the shining tools of mental gifts.
Bricks and Straw
© Edwin Morgan
My desk is cleared of the litter of ages;
Before me glitter the fair white pages;
The Foot-Path
© James Russell Lowell
It mounts athwart the windy hill
Through sallow slopes of upland bare,
And Fancy climbs with foot-fall still
Its narrowing curves that end in air.
The Pleasures of Imagination: Book The Second
© Mark Akenside
Till all its orbs and all its worlds of fire
Be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene,
The unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck;
And ever stronger as the storms advance,
Firm through the closing ruin holds his way,
Where nature calls him to the destin'd goal.
To The Right Honourable The Earl Of Orrery In Dublin
© Mary Barber
Let Others speak your Titles, and your Blood;
Accept from Me the glorious Name of Good.
This Honour only from fair Virtue springs,
Ennobles Slaves, adds Dignity to Kings.
To Heaven
© Benjamin Jonson
Good and great God, can I not think of thee
But it must straight my melancholy be?
On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic
© André Breton
Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
A Terror is More Certain . . .
© Bob Kaufman
A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I
know, than even now when all of my myths have become . . . , & walk
around in black shiny galoshes & carry dirty laundry to & fro, & read
great books & don’t know criminals intimately, & publish fat books of
One Woman's History
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
"The maiden free, the maiden wed.
Can never, never be the same,
A new life springs from out the dead.
And with the speaking of a name-
A breath upon the marriage bed,
She finds herself a something new.
Stupid Meditation on Peace
© Robert Pinsky
Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,
Symbol not only of Peace but sexual
Love, the couple nestled and brooding.
Nights on Planet Earth
© Louis Zukofsky
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the skyand a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very airis a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Australia To England
© John Farrell
What of the years of Englishmen?
What have they brought of growth and grace
An Essay on Criticism: Part 1
© Alexander Pope
But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a critic's noble name,
Be sure your self and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.
The Windy City [sections 1 and 6]
© Carl Sandburg
Early the red men gave a name to the river,
the place of the skunk,
the river of the wild onion smell,
Shee-caw-go.
In Order To
© Kenneth Patchen
Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had
to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The
order arrived three minutes of.
