Love poems
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Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes
© Thomas Campion
Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air,
Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair,
Then thrice three times tie up this true love's knot,
And murmur soft "She will, or she will not."
Living Among the Dead
© William Matthews
To love the dead is easy.
They are final, perfect.
But to love a child
is sometimes to fail at love
while the dead look on
with their abstract sorrow.
A Child's Question
© Louisa Lawson
O, why do you weep mother, why do you weep
For baby that fell in the summer to sleep?
Caliban upon Setebos
© Robert Browning
'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
brothers
© Paul Celan
(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)
1
invitation
The Violet
© Ann Taylor
DOWN in a green and shady bed,
A modest violet grew;
Its stalk was bent, it hung its head
As if to hide from view.
Chant d'automne (Song Of Autumn)
© Charles Baudelaire
Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!
J'entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres
Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours.
A Song: Ask me no more where Jove bestows
© Thomas Carew
Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Sunday: New Guinea
© Ishmael Reed
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,
The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,
From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,
Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him.
The Humbled Heart
© Siegfried Sassoon
Go your seeking, soul.
Mine the proven path of time’s foretelling.
Yours accordance with some mysteried whole.
I am but your passion-haunted dwelling.
Happiness (Reconsidered)
© Judith Viorst
Happiness
Is a clean bill of health from the doctor,
And the kids shouldn't move back home for
more than a year,
And not being audited, overdrawn, in Wilkes-Barre,
in a lawsuit or in traction.
The Picture
© Madison Julius Cawein
Above her, pearl and rose the heavens lay:
Around her, flowers flattered earth with gold,
Or down the path in insolence held sway-
Like cavaliers who ride the king's highway-
Scarlet and buff, within a garden old.
Essay on Psychiatrists
© Robert Pinsky
It's crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
To Live in the Mercy of God
© Denise Levertov
To lie back under the tallest
oldest trees. How far the stems
rise, rise
before ribs of shelter
open!
Deeply Morbid
© Stevie Smith
Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters
Always out of office hours running with her social betters
But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her
Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her
It was that look within her eye
Why did it always seem to say goodbye?
Song of the Greek Amazon
© William Cullen Bryant
I buckle to my slender side
The pistol and the scimitar,
And in my maiden flower and pride
Am come to share the tasks of war.
Fragment 5: Whom should I choose for my Judge?
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What is the meed of thy Song? 'Tis the ceaseless, the thousandfold Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure repeats and prolongs it,
Each with a different Tone, compleat or in musical fragments.
My Emmaleen
© George Ade
Lovey, my dovey dove
Ham-bone can't compaih.
Peppehmint and wintergreen
Not so sweet as Emmaleen.
