Life poems
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Fire Victim by Ned Balbo : American Life in Poetry #271 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
It’s not uncommon for people to turn their eyes away from those who bear the scars of misfortune. Here’s a poem about that by Ned Balbo, who lives and teaches in Maryland.
Fire Victim
Once, boarding the train to New York City,
Recollection
© Ada Cambridge
A wave-worn boulder, with green sea-moss wrapping
A silken mantle o'er its jagged sides;
And silvery, seething waters softly lapping
Through gulfs and channels hollow'd by the tides:
Henry The Hermit
© Robert Southey
It was a little island where he dwelt,
Or rather a lone rock, barren and bleak,
The Bakchesarian Fountain
© Alexander Pushkin
Has treason scaled the harem's wall,
Whose height might treason's self appal,
And slavery's daughter fled his power,
To yield her to the daring Giaour?
Epistle (to the author of The Three Impostors)
© Voltaire
I see from afar that era coming, those happy days,
When philosophy, enlightening humanity,
Must lead them in peace to the feet of the common master;
Frightful fanaticism will tremble to appear there:
There will be less dogma with more virtue.
A Song For Christmas
© George MacDonald
Hark, in the steeple the dull bell swinging
Over the furrows ill ploughed by Death!
Hark the bird-babble, the loud lark singing!
Hark, from the sky, what the prophet saith!
Poem For The Two Hundred And Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Founding Of Harvard College
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Thou whose bold flight would leave earth's vulgar crowds,
And like the eagle soar above the clouds,
Must feel the pang that fallen angels know
When the red lightning strikes thee from below!
Echoes from the Sabine Farm
© Eugene Field
WHAT end the gods may have ordained for me,
And what for thee,
Seek not to learn, Leuconöe,we may not know.
Chaldean tables cannot bring us rest.
T is for the best
To bear in patience what may come, or weal or woe.
A Panegyric Of The Dean In The Person Of A Lady In The North
© Jonathan Swift
Resolved my gratitude to show,
Thrice reverend Dean, for all I owe,
Too long I have my thanks delay'd;
Your favours left too long unpaid;
Earthly Parting
© John Kenyon
Had Heaven, to prayer of mine more kind,
But snapped my thread of Being first,
Extreme Unction
© James Russell Lowell
Go! leave me, Priest; my soul would be
Alone with the consoler, Death;
Apart
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
COME not with empty words that say,
"Your strength of manhood wastes away
In long, ignoble, fruitless years!"
I live apart from pain and tears,
The Bestiary: or Orpheuss Procession
© Guillaume Apollinaire
Admire the vital power
And nobility of line:
Its the voice that the light made us understand here
That Hermes Trismegistus writes of in Pimander.
In A Cuban Garden
© Sara Teasdale
HIBISCUS flowers are cups of fire,
(Love me, my lover, life will not stay)
The bright poinsettia shakes in the wind,
A scarlet leaf is blowing away.
My Daughter
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THOU hast thy mother's eyes, my child--
Her deep dark eyes: the undefiled
Sweetness which breathes around her mouth,
A perfect rosebud of the south,
A Book Of Strife In The Form Of The Diary Of An Old Soul - November
© George MacDonald
1.
THOU art of this world, Christ. Thou know'st it all;
Young England
© Horace Smith
The times still "grow to something strange";
We rap and turn the tables;
