Life poems
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Earlier Poems : An April Day
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When the warm sun, that brings
Seed-time and harvest, has returned again,
'T is sweet to visit the still wood, where springs
The first flower of the plain.
The Morning Half-Life Blues
© Marge Piercy
Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.
The Seven Of Pentacles
© Marge Piercy
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
My Mother's Body
© Marge Piercy
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
Stony Grey Soil
© Patrick Kavanagh
You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life conquering plough!
The mandrill stained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
Peace
© Patrick Kavanagh
Upon a headland by a whinny hedge
A hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrow
There's an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridge
And someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.
Out of that childhood country what fools climb
To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?
Advent
© Patrick Kavanagh
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
In Memory Of My Mother
© Patrick Kavanagh
I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily
Sleep Spaces
© Robert Desnos
In the night there are of course the seven wonders
of the world and the greatness tragedy and enchantment.
Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets.
There is you.
I Have Dreamed of You so Much
© Robert Desnos
I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?
Ebony Life
© Robert Desnos
A frightening stillness will mark that day
And the shadow of streetlights and fire-alarms will exhaust the light
All things, the quietest and the loudest, will be silent
The suckling brats will die
When the Rose is Faded
© Walter de la Mare
When the rose is faded,
Memory may still dwell on
Her beauty shadowed,
And the sweet smell gone.
The Remonstrance
© Walter de la Mare
I was at peace until you came
And set a careless mind aflame;
I lived in quiet; cold, content;
All longing in safe banishment,
Until your ghostly lips and eyes
Made wisdom unwise.
The Ghost
© Walter de la Mare
Peace in thy hands,
Peace in thine eyes,
Peace on thy brow;
Flower of a moment in the eternal hour,
Peace with me now.
At Ease
© Walter de la Mare
Most wounds can Time repair;
But some are mortal -- these:
For a broken heart there is no balm,
No cure for a heart at ease --
Alexander
© Walter de la Mare
It was the Great Alexander,
Capped with a golden helm,
Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,
In a dead calm.
From The Ladies Defence
© Lady Mary Chudleigh
Melissa: I've still rever'd your Order [she is responding to a Parson] as Divine;
And when I see unblemish'd Virtue shine,
When solid Learning, and substantial Sense,
Are joyn'd with unaffected Eloquence;
The Spirit's Depths
© Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
Not in the crisis of events
Of compass'd hopes, or fears fulfill'd,
Or acts of gravest consequence,
Are life's delight and depth reveal'd.
Soon, O Ianthe! Life is O'er
© Walter Savage Landor
Soon, O Ianthe! life is o'er,
And sooner beauty's heavenly smile:
Grant only (and I ask no more),
Let love remain that little while.
