Life poems
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Tooth Painter by Lucille Lang Day : American Life in Poetry #254 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California.
Tooth Painter
He was tall, lean, serious
Runic Verses
© George Borrow
O the force of Runic verses,
O the mighty strength of song
Cannot baffle all the curses
Which to mortal state belong.
At a Life's End
© Muriel Stuart
COME here, rekindle the old fire,
This last night leave no lamp unlit!
In later days we twain shall sit,
Remembering the joys of it,-
The warmth and sweetness of desire.
Under The Old Elm
© James Russell Lowell
Placid completeness, life without a fall
From faith or highest aims, truth's breachless wall,
Surely if any fame can bear the touch,
His will say 'Here!' at the last trumpet's call,
The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.
The Bloom of Life, fading in a happy Death.
© Mather Byles
I.
Great GOD, how frail a Thing is Man!
How swift his Minutes pass!
His Age contracts within a Span;
He blooms and dies like Grass.
To A Cathedral Tower: On The Evening Of The Thirty-Fifth Anniversay of Waterloo
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
And since thou art no older, 'tis to-day!
And I, entranced,-with the wide sense of gods
Hellas: A Lyrical Drama
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
The curtain of the Universe
Is rent and shattered,
The splendour-wingèd worlds disperse
Like wild doves scattered.
Rose The Red And White Lily
© Andrew Lang
O Rose the Red and White Lilly,
Their mother dear was dead,
And their father married an ill woman,
Wishd them twa little guede.
Satana.
© Arthur Henry Adams
SHE draws all men to serve her, and her lure
Is her pulsating human loveliness
The beauty of her bosom's rippling lines,
The passion pleading in her eyes, the pure
How The Babes In The Wood Showed They Couldn't Be Beaten
© Guy Wetmore Carryl
A man of kind and noble mind
Was H. Gustavus Hyde.
'Twould be amiss to add to this
At present, for he died,
In full possession of his senses,
The day before my tale commences.
Only Serpents
© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev
Only serpents let their skin be fallen
And a soul - all grown up and old.
We, alas, change an eternal soul,
Leaving body in eternal hold.
To Two Bereaved
© Katharine Tynan
Now in your days of worst distress,
The empty days that stretch before,
When all your sweet's turned bitterness;--
The Hand of the Lord is at your door.
Esse Quam Videri
© Charles Mackay
The knightly legend on thy shield betrays
The moral of thy life; a forecast wise,
Robert Browning
© Madison Julius Cawein
MASTER of human harmonies, where gong
And harp and violin and flute accord;
Each instrument confessing you its lord,
Within the deathless orchestra of Song.
The Little Dog
© Jean de La Fontaine
'TWOULD endless prove, and nothing would avail,
Each lover's pain minutely to detail:
Their arts and wiles; enough 'twill be no doubt,
To say the lady's heart was found so stout,
She let them sigh their precious hours away,
And scarcely seemed emotion to betray.
A Border Burn
© Alfred Austin
Where Autumn runnels fret and foam
Past banks of amber fern,
Since track was none I chanced to roam
Along a Border burn.
Trees And The Menace Of Night
© William Ernest Henley
Thro' the trees in the strange dead night,
Under the vast dead sky,
Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead
Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,
And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.
