Life poems
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The Cleaving
© Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)
© Emily Dickinson
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Passing Through
© Ai
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
Chomei at Toyama
© Ted Hughes
Swirl sleeping in the waterfall!
On motionless pools scum appearing
disappearing!
There Are Black
© James Russell Lowell
And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .
Sonnet: I Scarcely Grieve
© Henry Timrod
I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot
That pent my life within a city’s bounds,
Dream Song 14
© John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Mary Shelley in Brigantine
© Stephen Dunn
Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.
She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.
The Snow-Shower
© William Cullen Bryant
Stand here by my side and turn, I pray,
On the lake below, thy gentle eyes;
Liberty
© Archibald MacLeish
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.
Skin Cancer
© Mark Jarman
Balmy overcast nights of late September;
Palms standing out in street light, house light;
The Bachelor’s Soliloquy
© Edgar Albert Guest
To wed, or not to wed; that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
Encounter in the Local Pub
© Hugo Williams
Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
Noah’s Wife
© Michael Rosen
is doing her usual for comic relief.
She doesn’t
see why she should get on the boat, etc.,
Parental Recollections
© Charles Lamb
A child's a plaything for an hour;
Its pretty tricks we try
For that or for a longer space;
Then tire, and lay it by.
Étude Réaliste
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
(excerpt)
I
A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink,
Might tempt, should heaven see meet,
An angel's lips to kiss, we think,
A baby's feet.
