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Futurelessness
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.
Burns
© Charles Harpur
MY OWN WILD BURNS! these rude-wrought rhymes of thine
In golden worth are like the unshapely coin
Of some new realm, yet pure as from the mine
And Art may well be spared with such alloy
As dims the bullion to improve the die!
The Exposed Nest
© Robert Frost
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
The Riding Of The Rebel
© William Henry Ogilvie
And the boys were dumb with wonder, and sat, and the Red Creek overseer
Was first to drop from the stockyard fence and give him a hearty cheer.
He raised his hat in answer and --- the golden hair floated free!
And the blue eyes lit with laughter as she shouted merrily:
"You can reach me down my bridle, give my girths and saddle back,
For the outlaw of Glenidol is a broken lady's hack!"
The New Year
© George MacDonald
Be welcome, year! with corn and sickle come;
Make poor the body, but make rich the heart:
What man that bears his sheaves, gold-nodding, home,
Will heed the paint rubbed from his groaning cart!
A catchy phrase
© Ivan Donn Carswell
It was called Farm Fantastic, a catchy phrase,
and potentially a days wasted sweat.
Even after the event I cant say it wasnt,
and Im kind of glad we went, for better
Robert Gould Shaw
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Far better the slow blaze of Learning's light,
The cool and quiet of her dearer fane,
Than this hot terror of a hopeless fight,
This cold endurance of the final pain,-
Since thou and those who with thee died for right
Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
© Denise Levertov
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
Electra On Azalea Path
© Sylvia Plath
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
I Leave Thee for Awhile
© Eliza Cook
I leave thee for awhile, my love, I leave thee with a sigh;
The fountain spring within my soul is playing in mine eye;
I do not blush to own the tear,--let, let it touch my cheek,
And what my lip has failed to tell, that drop perchance may speak.
Mavourneen! when again I seek my green isle in the West,
Oh, promise thou wilt share my lot, and set this heart at rest.
The White Evening
© Madison Julius Cawein
From gray, bleak hills 'neath steely skies
Thro' beards of ice the forests roar;
Along the river's humming shore
The skimming skater bird-like flies.
Maiden-Song
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
But I have a will to work,
And a heart for you:
Bid me stay or bid me go.'
The Borough. Letter XVIII: The Poor And Their
© George Crabbe
applause:
To her own house is borne the week's supply;
There she in credit lives, there hopes in peace to
To Gordon Leaving Khartoum
© George MacDonald
The silence of traitorous feet!
The silence of close-pent rage!
The roar, and the sudden heart-beat!
And the shot through the true heart going,
The truest heart of the age!
And the Nile serenely flowing!
Lallegro
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Felicity!
Who ope'st to none that knocks, yet, laughing weak,
Talking to Grief
© Denise Levertov
Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
The Expert
© Rudyard Kipling
Youth that trafficked long with Death,
And to second life returns,
Squanders little time or breath
On his fellow-man's concerns.
Earned peace is all he asks
To fulfill his broken tasks.
The Haunted House
© Thomas Hood
Oh, very gloomy is the house of woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,
With all the dark solemnities that show
That Death is in the dwelling!
The Bridge of Sighs
© Thomas Hood
One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
