Life poems
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Saturday’s Child
© Countee Cullen
Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
With the stars strung for a rattle;
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon—
For implements of battle.
Surgeons must be very careful (156)
© Emily Dickinson
Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit - Life!
The Rain-bow
© Thomas Love Peacock
The day has pass’d in storms, though not unmix’d
With transitory calm. The western clouds,
Learning to swim
© Richard Jones
At forty-eight, to be given water,
which is most of the world, given life
in water, which is most of me, given ease,
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
Paradise Lost: Book VII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine
"This living hand, now warm and capable"
© John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
Sway
© Louis Simpson
Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye
Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname:
there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex,
and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra,
two sisters, Swing and Sway.
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
Circle Poems
© Lew Welch
Whenever I have a day off, I write a new poem.
Does this mean you shouldn’t work, or that you
A Celebration of Charis: IV. Her Triumph
© Benjamin Jonson
See the chariot at hand here of Love,
Wherein my lady rideth!
Psalm 150
© Mary Sidney Herbert
Oh, laud the Lord, the God of hosts commend,
Exalt his pow’r, advance his holiness:
Joy in the Woods
© Claude McKay
There is joy in the woods just now,
The leaves are whispers of song,
The Pear
© Ruth Stone
There is the picker, stretches for the knife,
There are the ravening who claw the fruit,
More, those adjuring wax that lasts a life,
And foxes, freak for cunning, after loot.
For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wits,
But husbandman will dry her for the pits.
Idea LXI
© Michael Drayton
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
