Life poems
/ page 487 of 844 /
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
© James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Fixed Ideas
© Kenneth Slessor
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,
Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,
Nightfall
© Madison Julius Cawein
O day, so sicklied o'er with night!
O dreadful fruit of fallen dusk!--
A Circe orange, golden-bright,
With horror 'neath its husk.
A Life Of Crime
© William Matthews
Frail friends, I love you all!
Maybe that's the trouble,
storm in the eye of a storm.
Everyone wants too much.
Instead we gratefully accept
some stylized despair:
Epistle To A Young Friend
© Robert Burns
I lang hae thought, my youthfu' friend,
A something to have sent you,
Tho' it should serve nae ither end
Than just a kind momento:
The House of Life: 19. Silent Noon
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fiy
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.
The Yellow Bowl by Rachel Contreni Flynn : American Life in Poetry #266 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
The great American poet William Carlos Williams taught us that if a poem can capture a moment in life, and bathe it in the light of the poet’s close attention, and make it feel fresh and new, that’s enough, that’s adequate, that’s good. Here is a poem like that by Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Illinois.
Palinode-December
© James Russell Lowell
Like some lorn abbey now, the wood
Stands roofless in the bitter air;
In ruins on its floor is strewed
The carven foliage quaint and rare,
And homeless winds complain along
The columned choir once thrilled with song.
The Sisters' Tragedy
© Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Both were young, in life's rich summer yet;
And one was dark, with tints of violet
In hair and eyes, and one was blond as she
Who rose-a second daybreak-from the sea,
Gold-tressed and azure-eyed. In that lone place,
Like dusk and dawn, they sat there face to face.
Sonnet III
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
OF all the woodland flowers of earlier spring,
These golden jasmines, each an air-hung bower.
Meet for the Queen of Fairies' tiring hour,
Seem loveliest and most fair in blossoming;
The Life of Lincoln West
© Gwendolyn Brooks
Ugliest little boy
that everyone ever saw.
That is what everyone said.
To James H.
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
Without Life's toil to win Life's earthly prize
What was thy mystery, oh, early Dead?
Shooting Star
© Wole Soyinka
1 In a concussion,
the mind severs the pain:
you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle,
and landing face first
in a cholla.
Palindrome
© Paul Eluard
There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
A Voice From The Bush
© Anonymous
High noon, and not a cloud in the sky
To break this blinding sun.
Well, I've half the day before me still,
And most of my journey done.
Questions And Answer
© Augusta Davies Webster
HAD I a heart till that day?
Who knows, who knows?
Ere the leaf burst upwards can any say
"Here is a green thing hidden away
In the lingering new year snows"?
Coquette And Her Lover
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
O, foolish querist! what if I,
Beholding your enamored face
And every well-attested trace
Of verdant, young idolatry,
Should, after my own fashion, choose
To play the subtly-amorous muse,
The Valley Of Fear
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
When close to that Valley your footsteps shall fare,
Turn, turn to the Roadway of Prayer-
The beautiful Roadway of Prayer.
