Poems begining by M
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Misreading Housman
© Linda Pastan
On this first day of spring, snow
covers the fruit trees, mingling improbably
Mutability ["The flower that smiles to-day"]
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
Madrigal: "Like the Idalian queen"
© William Drummond (of Hawthornden)
Like the Idalian queen,
Her hair about her eyne,
Making Peace
© Denise Levertov
A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”
Modern Love: II
© George Meredith
It ended, and the morrow brought the task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
Modern Love: XLVII
© George Meredith
Their sense is with their senses all mixed in,
Destroyed by subtleties these women are!
Much Madness is divinest Sense - (620)
© Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Myth
© Natasha Trethewey
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)
© Emily Dickinson
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Maze without a Minotaur
© Dana Gioia
If we could only push these walls
apart, unfold the room the way
Mary Shelley in Brigantine
© Stephen Dunn
Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.
She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.
Manifest
© Reginald Shepherd
Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body
master snapping masts in half, absent
winds’ workmanship: what window
will I look you through, what brook, stream
Movement Song
© Elizabeth Daryush
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
Morning of Drunkenness
© Arthur Rimbaud
O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.
