Mom poems
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The Broken Crutch: A Tale
© Robert Bloomfield
A burst of laughter rang throughout the hall,
And Peggy's tongue, though overborne by all,
Pour'd its warm blessings, for, without control
The sweet unbridled transport of her soul
Was obviously seen, till Herbert's kiss
Stole, as it were, the eloquence of bliss.
Cold Calls: War Music, Continued
© Christopher Logue
Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.
The Hill
© Nissim Ezekiel
Do not muse on it
from a distance:
it's not remote
for the view only,
it's for the sport
of climbing.
A Small Moment
© Cornelius Eady
I walk into the bakery next door
To my apartment. They are about
To pull some sort of toast with cheese
From the oven. When I ask:
What’s that smell? I am being
A poet, I am asking
How Is It That the Snow by Robert Haight: American Life in Poetry #193 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
The first two lines of this poem pose a question many of us may have thought about: how does snow make silence even more silent? And notice Robert Haight's deft use of color, only those few flecks of red, and the rest of the poem pure white. And silent, so silent. Haight lives in Michigan, where people know about snow.
How Is It That the Snow
How is it that the snow
amplifies the silence,
slathers the black bark on limbs,
heaps along the brush rows?
The Golden Age
© Bill Knott
is thought to be a confession, won by endless
torture, but which our interrogators must
hate to record—all those old code names, dates,
the standard narrative of sandpaper
throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far
The Garden
© Mark Strand
for Robert Penn Warren
It shines in the garden,
in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,
in the brim of my father’s hat
as he walks on the gravel.
Count Gismond—Aix in Provence
© Robert Browning
Christ God who savest man, save most
Of men Count Gismond who saved me!
Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,
Chose time and place and company
To suit it; when he struck at length
My honour, 't was with all his strength.
In Rubble
© David Wagoner
Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling
And walls and floor are rearranging
The Frogs
© Archibald Lampman
Often to me who heard you in your day,
With close wrapt ears, it could not choose but seem
That earth, our mother, searching in that way,
Men's hearts might know her spirit's inmost dream,
Ever at rest beneath life's change and stir,
Made you her soul, and bade you pipe for her.
Homo Will Not Inherit
© Mark Doty
Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,
The Owl and The Bell
© George MacDonald
Bing, Bim, Bang, Bome!
Sang the Bell to himself in his house at home,
High in the church-tower, lone and unseen,
In a twilight of ivy, cool and green;
With his Bing, Bing, Bim, Bing, Bang, Bome!
Singing bass to himself in his house at home.
A Villequier
© Victor Marie Hugo
Maintenant que Paris, ses pavés et ses marbres,
Et sa brume et ses toits sont bien loin de mes yeux ;
Maintenant que je suis sous les branches des arbres,
Et que je puis songer à la beauté des cieux ;
The Spire
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
Summer near the River
© John Betjeman
I am as monogamous as the North Star,
But I don’t want you to know it. You’d only take advantage.
While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.
All right, sleep! The cat means more to you than I.
I can rouse you, but then you swagger out.
I glimpse you from the window, striding toward the river.
