Mom poems
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Aside
© Karl Shapiro
Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets
The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches,
And all that is dear to the personal conscious reaches
Around us again like filings around iron magnets,
And war stands aside for an hour and looks at our faces
Of total absorption that seem to have lost their places.
Idyll XXXI. Loves
© Theocritus
Ah for this the most accursed, unendurable of ills!
Nigh two months a fevered fancy for a maid my bosom fills.
Fair she is, as other damsels: but for what the simplest swain
Claims from the demurest maiden, I must sue and sue in vain.
Pharsalia - Book III: Massilia
© Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
Phoenicians first (if story be believed)
Dared to record in characters; for yet
Papyrus was not fashioned, and the priests
Of Memphis, carving symbols upon walls
Of mystic sense (in shape of beast or fowl)
Preserved the secrets of their magic art.
The Deer-Stone
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
And in a hollowed stone it shed
Its milk so warm and white,
And then, all timid, stood apart
To watch the babe's delight.
White CanoeA Legend Of Niagara Falls
© Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
A CANTATA.
MINAHITA, Indian Maiden.
OREIKA, Her Friend.
TOLONGA, Minahitas Father.
DOLBREKA, Indian Chief.
Sonnet 15: "When I consider everything that grows..."
© William Shakespeare
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
Second Sunday After Christmas
© John Keble
And wilt thou hear the fevered heart
To Thee in silence cry?
Stray Birds 11- 20
© Rabindranath Tagore
11
SOME unseen fingers, like idle breeze,
are playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.
The Country Ride
© Kenneth Slessor
EARTH which has known so many passages
Of April air, so many marriages
Of strange and lovely atoms breeding light,
Never may find again that lost delight.
Eight Sonnets
© Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall remember only of this hour--
And weep somewhat, as now you see me weep--
The pathos of your love, that, like a flower,
Fearful of death yet amorous of sleep,
Droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed,
The wind whereon its petals shall be laid.
Sweet Marie
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
You were very fair to meet once, Marie,
With your eyes like some blue hiding flower,
Nonsuited.
© James Brunton Stephens
"DEAR RICHARD, come at once;" so ran her letter;
The letter of a married female friend:
The Cathedral
© James Russell Lowell
Far through the memory shines a happy day,
Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense,
On The Receipt Of My Mother's Picture Out Of Norfolk
© William Cowper
Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thinethy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me
An Ember Picture
© James Russell Lowell
How strange are the freaks of memory!
The lessons of life we forget,
While a trifle, a trick of color,
In the wonderful web is set,--
Family Reunion by Catherine Barnett: American Life in Poetry #67 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004
© Ted Kooser
One in a series of elegies by New York City poet Catherine Barnett, this poem describes the first gathering after death has shaken a family to its core. The father tries to help his grown daughter forget for a moment that, a year earlier, her own two daughters were killed, that she is now alone. He's heartsick, realizing that drinking can only momentarily ease her pain, a pain and love that takes hold of the entire family. The children who join her in the field are silent guardians.
Family Reunion
My father scolded us all for refusing his liquor.
He kept buying tequila, and steak for the grill,
until finally we joined him, making margaritas,
cutting the fat off the bone.
An Essay on Man: Epistle II
© Alexander Pope
Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,
Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And showed a Newton as we shew an Ape.
