Life poems
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Clouds
© Madison Julius Cawein
All through the tepid Summer night
The starless sky had poured a cool
Monotony of pleasant rain
In music beautiful.
O Me! O Life!
© Walt Whitman
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
In Memoriam A. H. H. 7
© Alfred Tennyson
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Wait
© C. K. Williams
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
My Thoughts To-Night
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
I sit by the fire musing,
With sad and downcast eye,
Stray Birds 51 - 60
© Rabindranath Tagore
51
YOUR idol is shattered in the dust
to prove that God's dust is greater than
your idol.
Sad Wine (II)
© Cesare Pavese
The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed.
Everything else will come easy. Three sips
The Picture Book
© Robert Graves
When I was not quite five years old
I first saw the blue picture book,
And Fraulein Spitzenburger told
Stories that sent me hot and cold;
I loathed it, yet I had to look:
It was a German book.
Chamber Thicket
© Sharon Olds
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
Monet Refuses the Operation
© Paul Eluard
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
An Easy Goin' Feller
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Ther' ain't no use in all this strife,
An' hurryin', pell-mell, right thro' life.
The Garden Buddha by Peter Pereira: American Life in Poetry #132 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
Children at play give personalities to lifeless objects, and we don't need to give up that pleasure as we grow older. Poets are good at discerning life within what otherwise might seem lifeless. Here the poet Peter Pereira, a family physician in the Seattle area, contemplates a smiling statue, and in that moment of contemplation the smile is given by the statue to the man.
The Garden Buddha
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distanceâalways
Morte d'Arthur
© Alfred Tennyson
To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:
"It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,
Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm.
A little thing may harm a wounded man.
Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,
Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word."
The Ghost
© Richard Harris Barham
There stands a City,- neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty;
Song from The Indian Emperor
© John Dryden
Hark, hark, the waters fall, fall, fall,
And with a murmuring sound
Dash, dash upon the ground,
To gentle slumbers call.
A Man in Blue
© James Schuyler
Under the French horns of a November afternoon
a man in blue is raking leaves
