Great poems
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Request to a Year
© Judith Wright
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
The Ox
© Russell Edson
He would stand over his newspaper, turning
the pages with his tongue, while he evacuated
on the rug.
The Theory
© Russell Edson
The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he
became a tiny one. So tiny as to have lost all substance. To have
become as theoretical as a point.
The Wounded Breakfast
© Russell Edson
Soon the huge shoe is descending the
opposite horizon, a monstrous snail squealing
and grinding into the earth . . .
In Memoriam Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse
© Henry Kendall
SHALL he, on whom the fair lord, Delphicus,
Turned gracious eyes and countenance of shine,
Be left to lie without a wreath from us,
To sleep without a flower upon his shrine?
The Patrol And The Gold-Digger
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Gordon, mounted, loq.
Ho ! you chap of grit and sinew,
Smoking in your pit,
Why thus labour discontinue ?
Why your forehead knit ?
Elephant Dormitory
© Russell Edson
But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray
wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail
falling out of bed.
The Columbiad: Book X
© Joel Barlow
From that mark'd stage of man we now behold,
More rapid strides his coming paths unfold;
His continents are traced, his islands found,
His well-taught sails on all his billows bound,
His varying wants their new discoveries ply,
And seek in earth's whole range their sure supply.
Hymn Read At The Dedication Of The Oliver Wendell Holmes Hospital At Hudson, Wisconsin
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
ANGEL of love, for every grief
Its soothing balm thy mercy brings,
For every pang its healing leaf,
For homeless want, thine outspread, wings.
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
© Robert Lowell
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
The Leader and the Bad Girl
© Henry Lawson
BECAUSE HE had sinned and suffered, because he loved the land,
And because of his wonderful sympathy, he held mens hearts in his hand.
Born and bred of the people, he knew their every whim,
And because he had struggled through poverty he could draw the poor to him:
Speaker and leader and poet, tall and handsome and strong,
With the eyes of a dog for faith and truth that blazed at the thought of a wrong.
The Universal Shyp
© Sebastian Brant
Come to, Companyons: ren: tyme it is to rowe:
Our Carake fletis: the se is large and wyde
The Prophecy Of St. Oran: Part I
© Mathilde Blind
"Earth, earth on the mouth of Oran, that he may blab no more." Gaelic Proverb.
To a Poet
© Claude McKay
There is a lovely noise about your name,
Above the shoutings of the city clear,
More than a moment's merriment, whose claim
Will greater grow with every mellowed year.
Through Agony
© Claude McKay
I All night, through the eternity of night,
Pain was my potion though I could not feel.
Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel,
Till I was reft of even my inner light,
The White City
© Claude McKay
I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
