Life poems
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Written In A Blank Leaf Of Macpherson's Ossian
© William Wordsworth
OFT have I caught, upon a fitful breeze,
Fragments of far-off melodies,
The Killing Place
© Edgar Albert Guest
Were hiking along at a two-forty pace
We 're making life seem like a man-killing race,
With our nerves all on edge and our jaws firmly set
We go rushing along; with our brows lined with sweat
And our cheeks pale and drawn every minute we dash,
And the goal that we 're after is merely more cash.
Koening Of The River
© Derek Walcott
Koening knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles
Codicil
© Derek Walcott
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
The Titmouse
© Walter de la Mare
If you would happy company win,
Dangle a palm-nut from a tree,
Idly in green to sway and spin,
Its snow-pulped kernel for bait; and see,
A nimble titmouse enter in.
In The Dark
© Mary Thacher Higginson
THE fields were silent, and the woodland drear,
The moon had set, and clouds hid all the stars;
And blindly, when a footfall met my ear,
I reached across the bars.
The Star-Apple Kingdom
© Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
Dark August
© Derek Walcott
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.
Blues
© Derek Walcott
You know they wouldn't kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it's so tough,
forget it.
Bankside: (Home Of Edmund Quincy Dedham)
© James Russell Lowell
I
I christened you in happier days, before
A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God
© Thomas Traherne
For all the mysteries, engines, instruments, wherewith the world is filled, which we are able to frame and use to thy glory.
For all the trades, variety of operations, cities, temples, streets, bridges, mariner's compass, admirable picture, sculpture, writing, printing, songs and music; wherewith the world is beautified and adorned.
Scenic Route
© Lisel Mueller
Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.
Love
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
A life was mine full of the close concern
Of many-voiced affairs. The world sped fast;
A Day Like Any Other
© Lisel Mueller
Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor's desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It's not true
Dead Men Tell No Tales
© Haniel Long
They say that dead men tell no tales!
Except of barges with red sails
And sailors mad for nightingales;
Another Version
© Lisel Mueller
Our trees are aspens, but people
mistake them for birches;
they think of us as characters
in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin
Immortality
© Lisel Mueller
In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
