Life poems
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Smokers of Paper
© Cesare Pavese
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner
mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Sonnets from the Portuguese 7: The Face
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
from The Task, Book I: The Sofa
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere,
The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter
© Mark Strand
It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived
Funeral Music
© Geoffrey Hill
William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483
Bereavement
© William Lisle Bowles
Whose was that gentle voice, that, whispering sweet,
Promised methought long days of bliss sincere!
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
© Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;
Listening
© David Ignatow
You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
The Continent’s End
© Robinson Jeffers
At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The moon now rises to her absolute rule
© Henry David Thoreau
The moon now rises to her absolute rule,
And the husbandman and hunter
Dejection: An Ode
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
Thoughtless Cruelty
© Charles Lamb
There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — ,
And should you thousand ages try
The life you've taken to supply,
You could not do it.
The Speed of Darkness
© Katha Pollitt
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.
Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
Calling Him Back from Layoff?
© Richard Jones
I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
Twilight Blues
© Samuel Menashe
(Morton St. Pier)
Lying here
Flat on my back
I can almost see
Myself in the morgue
On a slab, tagged
