Great poems
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God's Light-Houses
© Helen Hunt Jackson
1 When night falls on the earth, the sea
2 From east to west lies twinkling bright
3 With shining beams from beacons high
4 Which flash afar a friendly light.
Chance
© Helen Hunt Jackson
These things wondering I saw beneath the sun:
That never yet the race was to the swift,
The fight unto the mightiest to lift,
Nor favors unto men whose skill had done
Green Thumb
© Philip Levine
Shake out my pockets! Harken to the call
Of that calm voice that makes no sound at all!
Take of me all you can; my average weight
May make amends for this, my low estate.
Small Game
© Philip Levine
In borrowed boots which don't fit
and an old olive greatcoat,
I hunt the corn-fed rabbit,
game fowl, squirrel, starved bobcat,
Something Has Fallen
© Philip Levine
Something has fallen wordlessly
and holds still on the black driveway. You find it, like a jewel,
among the empty bottles and cans where the dogs toppled the garbage.
You pick it up, not sure if it is stone or wood
On The Meeting Of García Lorca And Hart Crane
© Philip Levine
Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane's
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
Sierra Kid
© Philip Levine
I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Mine,
Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode.
Dark walls of sugar pine --,
And where I left the road
The Water's Chant
© Philip Levine
Seven years ago I went into
the High Sierras stunned by the desire
to die. For hours I stared into a clear
mountain stream that fell down
The Whole Soul
© Philip Levine
Is it long as a noodle
or fat as an egg? Is it
lumpy like a potato or
ringed like an oak or an
How Much Earth
© Philip Levine
Torn into light, you woke wriggling
on a woman's palm. Halved, quartered,
shredded to the wind, you were the life
that thrilled along the underbelly
of a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond
you rinsed heaven with a sigh.
For The Country
© Philip Levine
THE DREAMThis has nothing to do with war
or the end of the world. She
dreams there are gray starlings
on the winter lawn and the buds
The Red Shirt
© Philip Levine
"...his poems that no one reads anymore become dust, wind, nothing,
like the insolent colored shirt he bought to die in."
-Vargas Llosa
Ode For Mrs. William Settle
© Philip Levine
In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
The Rains
© Philip Levine
The river rises
and the rains keep coming.
My Papa says
it can't flood for
The Dead
© Philip Levine
A good man is seized by the police
and spirited away. Months later
someone brags that he shot him once
through the back of the head
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit
© Philip Levine
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
I Sing The Body Electric
© Philip Levine
People sit numbly at the counter
waiting for breakfast or service.
Today it's Hartford, Connecticut
more than twenty-five years after
The Present
© Philip Levine
The day comes slowly in the railyard
behind the ice factory. It broods on
one cinder after another until each
glows like lead or the eye of a dog
Clouds
© Philip Levine
Dawn. First light tearing
at the rough tongues of the zinnias,
at the leaves of the just born.
Holding On
© Philip Levine
Green fingers
holding the hillside,
mustard whipping in
the sea winds, one blood-bright
