Life poems
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Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch
© Diane Wakoski
Foreword to “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch”
This poem is more properly a “dance poem” than a song or chant because the element of repetition is created by movements of language rather than duplicating words and sounds. However, it is in the spirit of ritual recitation that I wrote it/ a performance to drive away bad spirits perhaps.
The story behind the poem is this: a man and woman who have been living together for some time separate. Part of the pain of separation involves possessions which they had shared. They both angrily believe they should have what they want. She asks for some possession and he denies her the right to it. She replies that she gave him money for a possession which he has and therefore should have what she wants now. He replies that she has forgotten that for the number of years they lived together he never charged her rent and if he had she would now owe him $7,000.
She is appalled that he equates their history with a sum of money. She is even more furious to realize that this sum of money represents the entire rent on the apartment and implies that he should not have paid anything at all. She is furious. She kills him mentally. Once and for all she decides she is well rid of this man and that she shouldn’t feel sad at their parting. She decides to prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life. With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together.
Song Of Slaves In The Desert
© John Greenleaf Whittier
WHERE are we going? where are we going,
Where are we going, Rubee?
Lord of peoples, lord of lands,
Look across these shining sands,
Sonnet: On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a tale of distress
© William Wordsworth
She wept.--Life's purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Hudibras: Part 3 - Canto III
© Samuel Butler
What made thee, when they all were gone,
And none but thou and I alone,
To act the Devil, and forbear
To rid me of my hellish fear?
The Squatter's Baccy Famine.
© James Brunton Stephens
IN blackest gloom he cursed his lot;
His breath was one long weary sigh;
Moonlight
© Paul Verlaine
Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Theophany
© Evelyn Underhill
Deep cradled in the fringed mow to lie
And feel the rhythmic flux of life sweep by,
The Three Kings [1]
© Henry Lawson
The East is dead and the West is done, and again our course lies thus
South-east by Fate and the Rising Sun where the Three Kings* wait for us.
When our hearts are young and the world is wide, and the heights seem grand to climb
We are off and away to the Sydney-side; but the Three Kings bide their time.
To Marion
© George Gordon Byron
Marion! why that pensive brow?
What disgust to life hast thou?
Change that discontented air;
Frowns become not one so fair.
America In 1804
© Edgar Lee Masters
(America Conquers Europe.)
Foul shapes that hate the day, again grown bold,
Late driven hence, infested fane and court.
The laurels of our victory were amort.
Love-Lily
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Between the hands, between the brows,
Between the lips of Love-Lily,
The Untamed
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.
The Two Elizabeths
© John Greenleaf Whittier
AMIDST Thuringia's wooded hills she dwelt,
A high-born princess, servant of the poor,
Sweetening with gracious words the food she dealt
To starving throngs at Wartburg's blazoned door.
Promise
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
I GREW a rose within a garden fair,
And, tending it with more than loving care,
Lines written under the conviction that it is not wise to read Mathematics in November after one’s fire is out
© James Clerk Maxwell
In the sad November time,
When the leaf has left the lime,
The Two Goblets
© George Essex Evans
One wine is colourless, the dreamer said.
Who suffer keenest nobler joys attain.
And to the dregs drained from the goblet red
The draught of pain.
Beyond The Potomac
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
THEY slept on the field which their valor had won,
But arose with the first early blush of the sun,
For they knew that a great deed remained to be done,
When they passed o'er the river.
Another Insane Devotion
© Gerald Stern
This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich
with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped
