Life poems
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Neighbors by David Allen Evans: American Life in Poetry #1 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
We all know that the manner in which people behave toward one another can tell us a lot about their private lives. In this amusing poem by David Allan Evans, Poet Laureate of South Dakota, we learn something about a marriage by being shown a couple as they take on an ordinary household task.
Neighbors
They live alone
together,
Hector
© David McKee Wright
We fought for Troy behind a mossy wall;
We burned the Grecian ships below a tree . . .
Ah, that great war was forty years ago !
Yet still I know that Hector did not fall;
For when the bell rang truce to friend and foe,
Achilles, lying Greek, was under me!
W. Gilmore Simms
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THE swift mysterious seasons rise and set;
The omnipotent years pass o'er us, bright or dun;--
Dawns blush, and mid-days burn, 'till scarce aware
Of what deep meaning haunts our twilight air,
Life Well Lost
© Giordano Bruno
Winged by desire and thee, O dear delight!
As still the vast and succoring air I tread,
Note to Reality
© Tony Hoagland
but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass
thrust up above the January snow.
Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,
from the museum series on European masters.
The Ballad of the Black-Sheep
© Henry Lawson
A black-sheep, from England, who worked on the run
Riding where the stockmen ride
He sat by the hut when the days work was done
Lone huts where the black sheep bide.
Im tired of my life! to his lone self said he,
My girl and my country are both done with me!
Augustus Peabody Gardner
© John Jay Chapman
I SEEwithin my spiritmystic walls,
And slender windows casting hallowed light
Love: To A Little Girl
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
When we all lie still
Where churchyard pines their funeral vigil keep,
Ferdiah; Or, The Fight At The Ford
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Time is it, O Cuchullin, to arise,
Time for the fearful combat to prepare;
For hither with the anger in his eyes,
To fight thee comes Ferdiah called the Fair.
All The Talents
© George Canning
When the broad-bottom'd Junto, with reason at strife,
Resign'd, with a sigh, its political life;
When converted to Rome, and of honesty tired,
They gave back to the Devil the soul he inspired.
The Slave Mother
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seem’d as if a burden’d heart
Was breaking in despair.
Wasted
© Ada Cambridge
But, oh, how few the saved, how small the gain,
How poor the profit as against the cost,
The waste of life potential, vast and fair,
In soul unfructified and starveling brain,
Of Power that might have been, and might be-lost
For want of common food and common air!
Mother And The Baby
© Edgar Albert Guest
Mother and the baby! Oh, I know no lovelier pair,
For all the dreams of all the world are hovering 'round them there;
from Venus and Adonis
© William Shakespeare
Even as the sunne with purple-colourd face,
Had tane his last leaue of the weeping morne,
Rose-cheekt Adonis hied him to the chace,
Hunting he lou'd, but loue he laught to scorne,
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amaine vnto him,
And like a bold fac'd suter ginnes to woo him.
Sonnet XXVI: Look In My Griefs
© Samuel Daniel
Look in my griefs, and blame me not to mourn,
From care to care that leads a life so bad;
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: XLIX
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
I will not tell the secrets of that place.
When Madame Blanche returned to us again
I was kneeling there, while Esther kissed my face
And dried and comforted my tears. O vain
Living: After A Death
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Only to me, my love, only to me.
This cavern underneath the moaning sea;
This long, long life that I alone must tread,
To whom the living seem most like the dead,--
Thou wilt be safe out on the happy shore:
He who in God lives, liveth evermore.
For the Tattooed Man by Sharmila Voorakkara: American Life in Poetry #167 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laur
© Ted Kooser
and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more.
Her memory wraps you like a vise.
How simple the pain that trails and graces
the length of your body. How it fans, blazes,
writes itself over in the blood's tightening sighs,
bruises into wisdom you have no name for.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2005 by Sharmila Voorakkara, whose most recent book of poetry is âFire Wheel,â? Univ. of Akron Press, 2003. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
