Life poems
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Trollius and trellises
© Charles Bukowski
I won’t blame him for getting
out
and hope he sends me photos of his
Rose Lane, his
Gardenia Avenue.
Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz
© Laura Riding Jackson
“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.”
They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly
Sonnet 24: Rich Fools There Be
© Sir Philip Sidney
Rich fools there be, whose base and filthy heart
Lies hatching still the goods wherein they flow:
And damning their own selves to Tantal's smart,
Wealth breeding want, more blist more wretched grow.
Hopes And Memories
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
OUR hopes in youth are like those roseate shadows
Cast by the sunlight on the dewy grass
When first the fair morn opes her sapphire eyes;
They seem gigantic and yet graceful shades,
The Death Of The Pauper Child
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
Hush, mourning mother, wan and pale!
No sobsno grieving now:
Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye
© Gerald Stern
Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—
Gareth And Lynette
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the mother said,
'True love, sweet son, had risked himself and climbed,
And handed down the golden treasure to him.'
The Munich Mannequins
© Sylvia Plath
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Thirty-Eight. To Mrs ____y
© Charlotte Turner Smith
In early youths unclouded scene,
The brilliant morning of eighteen,
With health and sprightly joy elate,
We gazed on youths enchanting spring,
Nor thought how quickly time would bring
The mournful period thirty-eight!
The Paleontologist’s Blind Date by Philip Memmer : American Life in Poetry #240 Ted Kooser, U.
© Ted Kooser
We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.
The Paleontologist’s Blind Date
A Dream Lies Dead
© Dorothy Parker
Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!
Dead Man’s Dump
© Isaac Rosenberg
The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.
