Life poems
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The Salutation
© Thomas Traherne
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye been? behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
At Last
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Down, down like a pale leaf dropping
Under an autumn sky,
My love dropped into my bosom
Quietly, quietly.
The Breeder’s Cup
© David Lehman
They cannot keep the peace
or their hands off each other,
breed not yet preach
the old discredited creed.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: [Prelude]
© Alfred Tennyson
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Sic Semper Liberatoribus!
© Emma Lazarus
As one who feels the breathless nightmare grip
His heart-strings, and through visioned horrors fares,
Under A Tree
© Edgar Albert Guest
UNDER a tree where the breezes blow,
There is the spot that it's good to go
With the children bronzed by the Summer sun,
Bubbling with laughter and wholesome fun;
And I gather them round all the happy clan,
And forget for a while I'm a grizzled old man.
Glad by Coleman Barks : American Life in Poetry #222 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Coleman Barks, who lives in Georgia, is not only the English language's foremost translator of the poems of the 13th century poet, Rumi, but he's also a loving grandfather, and for me that's even more important. His poems about his granddaughter, Briny, are brim full of joy. Here's one:
Glad
Benlomond
© Thomas Campbell
Hadst thou a genius on thy peak,
What tales, white-headed Ben,
Could'st thou of ancient ages speak,
That mock th' historian's pen!
I Eat My Peas with Honey
© Pierre Reverdy
I eat my peas with honey;
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
I'm
© Emily Dickinson
I'm "wife"I've finished that
That other state
I'm CzarI'm "Woman" now
It's safer so
Lines Written In London
© Frances Anne Kemble
Struggle not with thy life!the heavy doom
Resist not, it will bow thee like a slave:
The Bungalows
© John Ashbery
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
Helen Of Troy
© Sara Teasdale
Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
Here And There: Or This World And The Next: Being Suitable Thoughts For A New Year
© Hannah More
Here bliss is short, imperfect, insincere,
But total, absolute, and perfect there.
Lost In The Mist
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
THE thin white snow-streaks pencilling
That mountain's shoulder gray,
While in the west the pale green sky
Smiled back the dawning day,
Christabel
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
And naught was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe:
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she.
Prisoners
© Denise Levertov
We taste other food that life,
like a charitable farm-girl,
holds out to us as we pass—
but our mouths are puckered,
a taint of ash on the tongue.
Against Lawn by Grace Bauer: American Life in Poetry #50 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.
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. Reprinted from the literary journal, Lake Effect, Volume 8, Spring 2004 by permission of the author. Copyright © 2004 by Grace Bauer, whose new book, Beholding Eye, is forthcoming from Wordtech Communications in 2006. 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.
Fragment 3: Come, come thou bleak December wind
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro' me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.
