Love poems
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I Am the Woman
© Gerard Malanga
I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker,
Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek,
Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek,
Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker,
Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek,
Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak.
self-exam (my body is a cage)
© Nick Flynn
Do this: take two fingers, place them on
the spot behind your ear, either
Soon, O Ianthe! Life is O'er
© Heather Fuller
Soon, O Ianthe! life is oer,
And sooner beautys heavenly smile:
Grant only (and I ask no more),
Let love remain that little while.
The Temper (I)
© George Herbert
How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes
Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel!
Instructions for Building Straw Huts
© Yusef Komunyakaa
First you must have
unbelievable faith in water,
Wall, Cave, and Pillar Statements, after Asôka
© Alan Dugan
In order to perfect all readers
the statements should be carved
The Cold Heaven
© William Butler Yeats
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
An Anatomy of the World
© John Donne
(excerpt)
AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Wherein,
by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress
Superbly Situated
© Padraic Colum
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
from The Seasons: Spring
© James Thomson
As rising from the vegetable World
My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend,
Happiness
© Jane Kenyon
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni
© Dante Alighieri
To the dim light and the large circle of shade
I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,
There where we see no color in the grass.
Natheless my longing loses not its green,
It has so taken root in the hard stone
Which talks and hears as though it were a lady.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 118
© Alfred Tennyson
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;
Sonnet LXIV: When I have Seen by Time's Fell Hand Defaced
© William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
“I Broke the Spell That Held Me Long”
© William Cullen Bryant
I broke the spell that held me long,
The dear, dear witchery of song.
I said, the poet’s idle lore
Shall waste my prime of years no more,
For Poetry, though heavenly born,
Consorts with poverty and scorn.
Toth Farry
© Sharon Olds
In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby
canines and incisors are mostly chaff,
The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue
© Geoffrey Chaucer
But for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay;
Of fustian he wered a gypon
Al bismótered with his habergeon;
For he was late y-come from his viage,
And wente for to doon his pilgrymage.
