Life poems
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The Whistle by Kathy Mangan : American Life in Poetry #242 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
There are lots of poems in which a poet expresses belated appreciation for a parent, and if you don’t know Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” you ought to look it up sometime. In this lovely sonnet, Kathy Mangan, of Maryland, contributes to that respected tradition.
The Whistle
Hymn To Colour
© George Meredith
With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,
And made them on each side a shadow seem.
Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,
Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream
To fall on daylight; and night puts away
Her darker veil for grey.
The Woodman And The Nightingale
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
Death and Birth
© George MacDonald
Welcome, friend! Bring in your bricks.
Mortar there? No need to mix?
That is well. And picks and hammers?
Verily these are no shammers!-
There, my friend, build up that niche,
That one with the painting rich!
The Rose of Midnight
© Vachel Lindsay
THE moon is now an opening flower,
The sky a cliff of blue.
The moon is now a silver rose;
Her pollen is the dew.
With Scindia to Delphi
© Rudyard Kipling
More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
The Wishing-Caps
© Rudyard Kipling
Life's all getting and giving,
I've only myself to give.
What shall I do for a living?
I've only one life to live.
Wilful Missing
© Rudyard Kipling
(Deserters)
There is a world outside the one you know,
To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare--
It is the place where "wilful-missings" go,
As we can testify, for we are there.
Lines Written Beneath An Elm In The Churchyard Of Harrow On The Hill, Sept. 2, 1807
© George Gordon Byron
Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky;
Where now alone I muse, who oft have trod,
With those I loved, thy soft and verdant sod;
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
The Widower
© Rudyard Kipling
For a season there must be pain--
For a little, little space
I shall lose the sight of her face,
Take back the old life again
While She is at rest in her place.
What the People Said
© Rudyard Kipling
(June 21st, 1887)
By the well, where the bullocks go
Silent and blind and slow --
By the field where the young corn dies
The Creeds Of The Bells
© Anonymous
How sweet the chime of the Sabbath bells!
Each one its creed in music tells
The First Part: Sonnet 11 - Lamp of heaven's crystal hall that brings the hours,
© William Henry Drummond
Lamp of heaven's crystal hall that brings the hours,
Eye-dazzler, who makes the ugly night
Lines To Fanny
© John Keats
What can I do to drive away
Remembrance from my eyes? for they have seen,
Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
To the Unknown Goddess
© Rudyard Kipling
Will you conquer my heart with your beauty; my sould going out from afar?
Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautions shikar?Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind?
Shall I meet you next session at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind?Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West,
Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast?Will you stay in the Plains till September -- my passion as warm as the day?
To the True Romance
© Rudyard Kipling
Thy face is far from this our war,
Our call and counter-cry,
I shall not find Thee quick and kind,
Nor know Thee till I die,
