Life poems
/ page 806 of 844 /
Etesia Absent
© Henry Vaughan
Love, the world's life! What a sad death
Thy absence is to lose our breath
At once and die, is but to live
Enlarged, without the scant reprieve
Christ's Nativity
© Henry Vaughan
1 Awake, glad heart! get up and sing!
2 It is the birth-day of thy King.
3 Awake! awake!
4 The Sun doth shake
5 Light from his locks, and all the way
6 Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day.
The Orient Express
© Randall Jarrell
One looks from the train
Almost as one looked as a child. In the sunlight
What I see still seems to me plain,
I am safe; but at evening
The House In The Woods
© Randall Jarrell
At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the woodMakes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to goodOr evil: to the cage, to the oven, to the House
In the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the storyWe make of life. But after the last leaf,
The Elementary Scene
© Randall Jarrell
Looking back in my mind I can see
The white sun like a tin plate
Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking --a wet swing--
Well Water
© Randall Jarrell
What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
A Country Life
© Randall Jarrell
A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
Next Day
© Randall Jarrell
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Hope
© Randall Jarrell
The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner
© Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
For Catherine: Juana, Infanta of Navarre
© Erin Belieu
Once you were a daughter, too,
then a wife and now the mother
of a baby with a Spanish name.
In Barracks
© Siegfried Sassoon
The barrack-square, washed clean with rain,
Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.
Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold,
March and wheel and march again.
Night on the Convoy
© Siegfried Sassoon
We are going home. The troop-ship, in a thrill
Of fiery-chamberd anguish, throbs and rolls.
We are going home ... victims ... three thousand souls.
The Dream
© Siegfried Sassoon
I cannot hear their voices, but I see
Dim candles in the barn: they gulp their tea,
And soon theyll sleep like logs. Ten miles away
The battle winks and thuds in blundering strife.
And I must lead them nearer, day by day,
To the foul beast of war that bludgeons life.
The Last Meeting
© Siegfried Sassoon
Because the night was falling warm and still
Upon a golden day at Aprils end,
I thought; I will go up the hill once more
To find the face of him that I have lost,
And speak with him before his ghost has flown
Far from the earth that might not keep him long.
The Effect
© Siegfried Sassoon
The effect of our bombardment was terrific.
One man told me he had never seen so many dead before.
War Correspondent.
The Troops
© Siegfried Sassoon
Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Today
© Siegfried Sassoon
This is To-day, a child in white and blue
Running to meet me out of Night who stilled
The ghost of Yester-eve; this is fair Morn
The mother of To-morrow. And these clouds
Banishment
© Siegfried Sassoon
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.
Blind
© Siegfried Sassoon
His headstrong thoughts that once in eager strife
Leapt sure from eye to brain and back to eye,
Weaving unconscious tapestries of life,
Are now thrust inward, dungeoned from the sky.
