Life poems
/ page 494 of 844 /
Last August Hours Before the Year 2000
© Naomi Shihab Nye
What a drama to keep thinking the last summer
the last birthday
before the calendar turns to zeroes.
My neighbor says anything we plant
in September takes hold.
She’s lining pots of little grasses by her walk.
Complaint Of The Absence Of Her Lover Being Upon The Sea
© Henry Howard
O HAPPY dames! that may embrace
The fruit of your delight,
Love and Life: A Song
© John Wilmot
All my past life is mine no more,
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams givn oer,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.
To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris
© Helen Maria Williams
What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
Aspecta Medusa (for a Drawing)
© Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed,
Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head:
Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen
That death she liv'd by.
Declining Days
© Henry Francis Lyte
Why do I sigh to find
Life's evening shadows gathering round my way?
The keen eye dimming, and the buoyant mind
Unhinging day by day?
I Hear
© Paul Celan
I hear, the Bread, that looks on him,
heals the Hanged-Man,
the Bread, his Wife baked for him,
Jhansi Ki Rani (With English Translation)
© Subhadra Kumari Chauhan
4
With valor in a grand festival, she got married in Jhansi,
After her marriage, Laxmibai came to Jhansi as a queen with shower of joy,
A grand celebration took place in the royal palace of Jhansi. That was a good luck for Bandelos that she came to Jhansi,
That was as Chitra met with Arjun or Shiv had got his beloved Bhavani (Durga).
From the mouths of the Bandelas and the Harbolas (Religious singers of Bandelkhand), we heard the tale of the courage of the Queen of Jhansi relating how gallantly she fought like a man against the British intruders: such was the Queen of Jhansi.
The Poet at Seventeen
© Larry Levis
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
Beauty
© Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
Titanic Requiem
© Harriet Monroe
Sleep softly in your ocean bed,
You who could grandly die !
Our fathers, who at Shiloh bled,
Accept your company.
Palladium
© Matthew Arnold
Set where the upper streams of Simois flow
Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood;
And Hector was in Ilium, far below,
And fought, and saw it not-but there it stood!
The Letter From Home by Nancyrose Houston : American Life in Poetry #252 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laure
© Ted Kooser
My grandfather, when in his nineties, wrote me a letter in which he listed everything he and my uncle had eaten in the past week. That was the news. I love this poem by Nancyrose Houston of Seattle for the way it plays with the character of those letters from home that many of us have received.
The Rhyme of Joyous Garde
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Through the lattice rushes the south wind, dense
With fumes of the flowery frankincense
From hawthorn blossoming thickly;
And gold is shower'd on grass unshorn,
A Farewell To My Youth
© France Preseren
O happier half of days decreed to me,
My early years, so soon you passed away:
Might and Right
© Henry Van Dyke
If Might made Right, life were a wild-beasts' cage;
If Right made Might, this were the golden age;
But now, until we win the long campaign,
Right must gain Might to conquer and to reign.
The Phantom Ball
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
You remember the hall on the corner?
To-night as I walked down street
I heard the sound of music,
And the rhythmic beat and beat,
In time to the pulsing measure
Of lightly tripping feet.
