Life poems
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Acid
© Roddy Lumsden
My mother told it straight, London will finish you off,
and I'd heard what Doctor Johnson said, When a man is tired
of London, he is tired of life, but I'd been tired of life
Peter
© Marianne Clarke Moore
Strong and slippery,
built for the midnight grass-party
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away--
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding
Marriage
© Marianne Clarke Moore
This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one's mind
The Steeple-Jack
© Marianne Clarke Moore
Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
The Pangolin
© Marianne Clarke Moore
Another armored animal--scale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped
The Height of Land
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Here is the height of land:
The watershed on either hand
Goes down to Hudson Bay
Or Lake Superior;
The Half-breed Girl
© Duncan Campbell Scott
She is free of the trap and the paddle,
The portage and the trail,
But something behind her savage life
Shines like a fragile veil.
The Forsaken
© Duncan Campbell Scott
I
Once in the winter
Out on a lake
In the heart of the north-land,
Reading Pornography in Old Age
© Howard Nemerov
Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable
In the heat, upon demand, aroused again
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.
Permanence
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Set within a desert lone,
Circled by an arid sea,
Stands a figure carved in stone,
Where a fountain used to be.
Ode for the Keats Centenary
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Where, searching through the ferny breaks,
The moose-fawns find the springs;
Where the loon laughs and diving takes
Her young beneath her wings;
From Shadow
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Now the November skies,
And the clouds that are thin and gray,
That drop with the wind away;
A flood of sunlight rolls,
The Chinese Nightingale
© Vachel Lindsay
"I remember, I remember
That Spring came on forever,
That Spring came on forever,"
Said the Chinese nightingale.
Avis
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Night fell with the ferny dusk,
Planets paled and grew,
Up, with lily and clarid turns
Throbbing through,
Rose the robin's song,
Heart of home and love that burns beating in the dew.
Afterwards
© Duncan Campbell Scott
Her life was touched with early frost,
About the April of her day,
Her hold on earth was lightly lost,
And like a leaf she went away.
Young Munro the Sailor
© William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas on a sunny morning in the month of May,
I met a pretty damsel on the banks o' the Tay;
I said, My charming fair one, come tell to me I pray,
Why do you walk alone on the banks o' the Tay.
The Wreck of the Steamer Mohegan
© William Topaz McGonagall
Good people of high and low degree,
I pray ye all to list to me,
And I'll relate a terrible tale of the sea
Concerning the unfortunate steamer, Mohegan,
That against the Manacles Rocks, ran.
The Wreck of the Steamer London
© William Topaz McGonagall
Then the captain cried, Lower down the small boats,
And see if either of them sinks or floats;
Then the small boats were launched on the stormy wave,
And each one tried hard his life to save
From a merciless watery grave.
