Life poems
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Fresh Air
© Kenneth Koch
3
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.”
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney
Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle,
But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea.
Epilogue To Shapes & Shadows
© Madison Julius Cawein
Beyond the moon, within a land of mist,
Lies the dim Garden of all Dead Desires,
Walled round with morning's clouded amethyst,
And haunted of the sunset's shadowy fires;
There all lost things we loved hold ghostly tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
"The Foresters"
© William Watson
Clear as of old the great voice rings to-day,
While Sherwood's oak-leaves twine with Aldworth's bay:
Sonnet XXIV. The Seceders. 1.
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
FAR from the pure Castalian fount our feet
Have strayed away where daily we unlearn
How Truth is one with Beauty. For we turn
No more to hear the strains we sprang to greet
How It Adds Up
© Tony Hoagland
There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.
And the day I quit the job my father got me.
And the day I stood outside a door,
and listened to my girlfriend making love
to someone obviously not me, inside,
Burying Friends
© Kenneth Slessor
BURYING friends is not a pomp,
Not, indeed, Roman:
Lacking the monument,
Heroic stone;
A Legend of Service
© Henry Van Dyke
It pleased the Lord of Angels (praise His name!)
To hear, one day, report from those who came
Hugging the Jukebox
© Naomi Shihab Nye
They’ve tried putting him to bed, but he sings in bed.
Even in Spanish—and he doesn’t speak Spanish!
Sings and screams, wants to go back to the jukebox.
O mama I was born with a trumpet in my throat
spent all these years tryin’ to cough it up …
A Better Resurrection
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Adelaide Ironside.
© James Brunton Stephens
(Australian Painter. Born at Sydney, 17th November, 1831. Died at
Rome, 15th November, 1867.)
[GUARDIAN ANGEL.]
The Search Party
© William Matthews
Reader, by now you must be sure
you know just where we are,
deep in symbolic woods.
Irony, self-accusation,
someone else’s suffering.
The search is that of art.
Equations of the Light
© Dana Gioia
Turning the corner, we discovered it
just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—
a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long
resting between the noisy avenues.
The Clan of MacCaura
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Oh! bright are the names of the chieftains and sages,
That shine like the stars through the darkness of ages,
