Life poems
/ page 661 of 844 /
"Manus Animam Pinxit"
© Francis Thompson
Lady who hold'st on me dominion!
Within your spirit's arms I stay me fast
The Double Image
© Anne Sexton
They sent me letters with news
of you and I made moccasins that I would never use.
When I grew well enough to tolerate
myself, I lived with my mother, the witches said.
But I didn't leave. I had my portrait
done instead.
A Summer Shower
© Henry Timrod
Welcome, rain or tempest
From yon airy powers,
We have languished for them
Many sultry hours,
And earth is sick and wan, and pines with all her flowers.
Amarantha. A Pastorall
© Richard Lovelace
Up with the jolly bird of light
Who sounds his third retreat to night;
Faire Amarantha from her bed
Ashamed starts, and rises red
The Dead Heart
© Anne Sexton
And I said, merely to myself, "I wish it could be for a
different seizure--as with Molly Bloom and her and
yes I said yes I will Yes."
The Children
© Anne Sexton
The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of dirty clothes,
That Day
© Anne Sexton
This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
The Wedding Ring Dance
© Anne Sexton
I dance in circles holding
the moth of the marriage,
thin, sticky, fluttering
its skirts, its webs.
The Ambition Bird
© Anne Sexton
So it has come to this
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine
The Witch's Life
© Anne Sexton
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
Unknown Girl In A Maternity Ward
© Anne Sexton
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
Flee On Your Donkey
© Anne Sexton
Today an intern knocks my knees,
testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack
on the stethoscope.
Upon His Majesty's Happy Return
© Edmund Waller
The rising sun complies with our weak sight,
First gilds the clouds, then shows his globe of light
At such a distance from our eyes, as though
He knew what harm his hasty beams would do.
On The Death Of A Friend's Child
© James Russell Lowell
Death never came so nigh to me before,
Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused
Doors, Doors, Doors
© Anne Sexton
Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.
Rumpelstiltskin
© Anne Sexton
Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
© Anne Sexton
The paralytic's wife
who takes her love to town,
sitting on the bar stool,
downing stingers and peanuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.
Colemira. A Culinary Eclogue
© William Shenstone
Nec tantum Veneris, quantum studiosa culinae.
Imitation.
Insensible of soft desire,
Behold Colemira prove
More partial to the kitchen fire
Than to the fire of Love.
