Poems begining by L
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[Long Neglect Has Worn Away]
© Emily Jane Brontë
Long neglect has worn away
Half the sweet enchanting smile;
Time has turned the bloom to gray;
Mold and damp the face defile.
Lincoln, Man of the People
© Edwin Markham
When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
Leaves
© Gerald Stern
He was cleaning leaves for one at a time
was what he needed and a minute before the two
Let the Light Enter
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
The Dying Words of Goethe
“Light! more light! the shadows deepen,
Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve
© John Betjeman
who took heroin, then sleeping pills, and who lies in a New York hospital
The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea;
Lo! Victress On The Peaks
© Walt Whitman
LO! Victress on the peaks!
Where thou, with mighty brow, regarding the world,
Limerick: There was an old man on the Border
© Edward Lear
There was an old man on the Border,
Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat,
and made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
Love's Nocturn
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Master of the murmuring courts
Where the shapes of sleep convene!—
Letter To Sainte-Beuve
© Charles Baudelaire
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
Lone Gentleman
© Pablo Neruda
The gay young men and the love-sick girls,
and the abandoned widows suffering in sleepless delirium,
and the young pregnant wives of thirty hours,
and the raucous cats that cruise my garden in the shadows,
Loved a little, Worked a little
© Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Kuch Ishaq Kiya Kuch Kaam Kiya.
Who Log Bohat Khush Qismat Thay,
Love Sonnet LVIII
© Zora Bernice May Cross
As midnight drinks a message from the moon
And morning takes her orders from the sun,
So let our bodies to our souls submit
And live for ever in their still high-noon,
Where morn and midnight gather into one,
And only angels on their missions flit.
Lincoln
© Roald Dahl
Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all,
That which is gendered in the wilderness
Love for a Hand
© Ishmael Reed
Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,
And soon down ladders of reflected light
The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually
They separate on paths of long ago,
Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew
That leads, live as a nerve, to memory.
[Letter to Gary Bottone]
© Jack Spicer
Dear Gary,
Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.
Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.
I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.
Love is the Water of Life
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Everything other than love for the most beautiful God
though it be sugar- eating.
What is agony of the spirit?
To advance toward death without seizing
hold of the Water of Life.
Looking into History
© Lola Ridge
Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye
Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.
Belief might lend them life again. I try
Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief
Later On
© William Percy French
Later on, later on,
Oh what many friends have gone,
Sweet lips that smiled and loving eyes that shone
Through the darkness into light,
One by one they've winged their flight
And perhaps we'll play together -- later on.
