Life poems
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The Little Left Hand - Act III
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Interior of a Church--Davis, Bradshaw, and others.
Davis. The sword of the Lord and the sword of Gideon!
It was good To see the red--coats run before our multitude.
We broke them by sheer numbers--
Faces
© Edgar Albert Guest
I look into the faces of the people passing by,
The glad ones and the sad ones, and the lined with misery,
And I wonder why the sorrow or the twinkle in the eye;
But the pale and weary faces are the ones that trouble me.
Footfalls
© Henry Kendall
The embers were blinking and clinking away,
The casement half open was thrown;
There was nothing but cloud on the skirts of the Day,
And I sat on the threshold alone!
To A Lady, With Falconer's 'Shipwreck'
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oh! not by Cam or Isis, famous streams
In arched groves, the youthful poet's choice;
Nor while half-listening, mid delicious dreams,
To harp and song from lady's hand and voice;
Sonnet XXVI
© Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie--
The Meaning Of Death
© Allen Tate
Time, fall no more.
Let that be life time falls no more. The threat
Of time we in our own courage have forsworn.
Let light fall, there shall be eternal light
And all the light shall on our heads be worn
Semper Fidelis
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THINK you, had we two lost fealty, something would not, as I sit
With this book upon my lap here, come and overshadow it?
Hide with spectral mists the pages, under each familiar leaf
Lurk, and clutch my hand that turns it with the icy clutch of grief?
In A Spring Garden
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
WHEN Heaven was stormy, Earth was cold,
And sunlight shunned the wold and wave,--
Thought burrowed in the churchyard mould,
And fed on dreams that haunt the grave:--
The Arctic Visitation
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
SOME air-born genius, with malignant mouth,
Breathed on the cold clouds of an Arctic zone--
Which o'er long wastes of shore and ocean blown
Swept threatening, vast, toward the amazèd South:
Merlin And Vivien
© Alfred Tennyson
A storm was coming, but the winds were still,
And in the wild woods of Broceliande,
Before an oak, so hollow, huge and old
It looked a tower of ivied masonwork,
At Merlin's feet the wily Vivien lay.
The School-Boy
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
So ran my lines, as pen and paper met,
The truant goose-quill travelling like Planchette;
Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways
Full many a slipshod line, alas! betrays;
Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few
Have builded worse--a great deal--than they knew.
A Forgotten Fear
© James Baker
In the desert my mind is lost,
Dry and helpless, nothing of use.
Dead to be, but a salt at loss
Tearing up a face of abuse.
Open Door
© Paul Eluard
Life is truly kind
Come to me, if I go to you its a game,
The angels of bouquets grant the flowers a change of hue.
The Cat
© Harry Graham
My children, never, never steal!
To know their offspring is a thief
Will often make a father feel
Annoyed and cause a mother grief;
So never steal, but, when you do,
Be sure there's no one watching you.
Emily, John, James, and I
© William Schwenck Gilbert
EMILY JANE was a nursery maid,
JAMES was a bold Life Guard,
JOHN was a constable, poorly paid
(And I am a doggerel bard).
Homecoming by Keith Althaus: American Life in Poetry #65 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else. I like the way he suggests, at the end, that it may take days before that silence heals over.
Homecoming
The Doctor Asked Her What She Wanted Done
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
And questioning her, she'd never seen before,
But only watching by his bed once more
And sitting silent if a knocking came…
She said at length, feeling the doctor's eyes,
"I don't know what you do exactly when a person dies."
