History poems
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Unwanted
© Edward Field
The poster with my picture on it
Is hanging on the bulletin board in the Post Office.I stand by it hoping to be recognized
Posing first full face and then profileBut everybody passes by and I have to admit
The photograph was taken some years ago.I was unwanted then and I'm unwanted now
New Hampshire
© Robert Frost
Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,
One each of everything as in a showcase,
Which naturally she doesn't care to sell.
To A Derelict
© Robert Laurence Binyon
O travelled far beyond unhappiness
Into a dreadful peace!
Why tarriest thou here? The street is bright
With noon; the music of the tidal sound
Do not be ashamed
© Wendell Berry
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
The Price Of Freedom
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Man of Ireland, heir of sorrow,
Wronged, insulted, scorned, oppressed,
One Day And Another: A Lyrical Eclogue Part IV
© Madison Julius Cawein
_They who die young are blest.--
Should we not envy such?
They are Earth's happiest,
God-loved and favored much!--
They who die young are blest._
Don Juan: Canto The Fifteenth
© George Gordon Byron
Ah!--What should follow slips from my reflection;
Whatever follows ne'ertheless may be
Barada
© Nizar Qabbani
Oh eyes of the gazelle in the desert of Sham
Look down. This is the age of lavender
They have detained you in the pavilions for a long time
We have woven tents from tears
God has witnessed that we have broken no promise
Or secured protection for those we love
Somewhere This
© Eli Siegel
Trees standing in rain;
Footfalls on the pavement, feet crushing leaves;
A little girl leaving her house;
The moon, barely to be seen, shining dully in the gray sky;
An Ode In Time Of Inauguration
© Franklin Pierce Adams
G.W., initial prex,
Right down in Wall Street, New York City,
Took his first oath. Oh, multiplex
The whimsies quaint, the comments witty
One might evolve from that! I scorn
To mock the spot where he was sworn.
Gold Egg: A Dream-Fantasy
© James Russell Lowell
I swam with undulation soft,
Adrift on Vischer's ocean,
And, from my cockboat up aloft,
Sent down my mental plummet oft
In hope to reach a notion.
Whiteness I Remember
© Sylvia Plath
Whiteness being what I remember
About Sam: whiteness and the great run
He gave me. I've gone nowhere since but
Going's been tame deviation. White,
Account
© Czeslaw Milosz
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.
The Land
© Rudyard Kipling
When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius-a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: "What about that River-piece for layin'' in to hay?"
The Ancient World
© Mark Doty
Today the Masons are auctioning
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans,
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes
labeled inside the collar "Potentate"
Hypocrite Auteur
© Archibald MacLeish
mon semblable, mon frère
(1)
Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction
In that perspective of the action
Which pictures us inhabiting the end
Of everything with death for only friend.
