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To Ben Jonson
© Thomas Carew
'Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand
Hath fix'd upon the sotted age a brand
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze
© Cornelius Eady
And mothers letting their babies
Be held by strangers.
And the bus drivers
Taping over their fare boxes
And willing to give directions.
Come Up from the Fields Father
© Walt Whitman
Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
His death in Benares
© Kabir
his front yard
is the true Benares
— Devara Dasimayya,
tr. A.K. Ramanujan
His death in Benares
Won’t save the assassin
From certain hell,
They Clapped
© Nikki Giovanni
they clapped when they took off
for home despite the dead
dream they saw a free future
The Seekonk Woods
© Washington Allston
When first I walked here I hobbled
along ties set too close together
The Dictionary of Silence
© Debora Greger
And in that city the houses of the dead
are left empty, if the dead are famous enough;
by day the living pay to see if dust is all
that befalls the lives they left behind.
How to Get There
© Philip Levine
Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street
to see our famous firehouse, home
of Engine 205 and
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
The Way to the River
© William Stanley Merwin
The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor
When Thou Must Home to Shades of Underground
© Thomas Campion
When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv'd, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish'd love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;
The Disabled Debauchee
© John Wilmot
As some brave admiral, in former war
Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
Two rival fleets appearing from afar,
Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill;
Reunion
© Dana Gioia
This is my past where no one knows me.
These are my friends whom I can’t name—
Here in a field where no one chose me,
The faces older, the voices the same.
Ornithogalum Dubium
© Roddy Lumsden
Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace
with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap
Shapes
© Ruth Stone
In the longer view it doesnt matter.
However, its that having lived, it matters.
Light Night
© James Schuyler
Stoop, dove, horrid maid,
spread your chiffon on our
wood rot breeding the
Destroying Angel, white,
lathe-shapely, trout-lily
lovely. Taste, and have it.
For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop
© David Wagoner
I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open
Vaguely and gradually go sliding
The Corn-Stalk Fiddle
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.
