Mom poems
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Fit The Second - The Bellman's Speech
© Lewis Carroll
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!
Safari, Rift Valley by Roy Jacobstein: American Life in Poetry #116 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2
© Ted Kooser
It's the oldest kind of story: somebody ventures deep into the woods and comes back with a tale. Here Roy Jacobstein returns to America to relate his experience on a safari to the place believed by archaeologists to be the original site of human life. And against this ancient backdrop he closes with a suggestion of the brevity of our lives.
The Bakchesarian Fountain
© Alexander Pushkin
Has treason scaled the harem's wall,
Whose height might treason's self appal,
And slavery's daughter fled his power,
To yield her to the daring Giaour?
Poem For The Two Hundred And Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Founding Of Harvard College
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
Thou whose bold flight would leave earth's vulgar crowds,
And like the eagle soar above the clouds,
Must feel the pang that fallen angels know
When the red lightning strikes thee from below!
The Greater Cats
© Victoria Mary Sackville-West
The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
"Little Jack Janitor"
© James Whitcomb Riley
Then he tried
And rapped the little drawer in the side,
And called out sharply "Are you in there, Jack?"
And then a little, squeaky voice came back,--
"_Of course I'm in here--ain't you got the key
Turned on me!_"
A Preaching From A Spanish Ballad
© George Meredith
Ladies who in chains of wedlock
Chafe at an unequal yoke,
Not to nightingales give hearing;
Better this, the raven's croak.
Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex
© Larry Levis
In the Borghese, Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,
Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,
And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of David a look of pity
In Memoriam A. H. H.
© Alfred Tennyson
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
Esther, A Sonnet Sequence: XXIV
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Thus through these griefs I had been set apart,
As for a double priesthood. Life to me,
In those first moments when I probed my heart,
Less an enchantress seemed than enemy.
Crotalus [Rattlesnake Bar, Sierras]
© Francis Bret Harte
No life in earth, or air, or sky;
The sunbeams, broken silently,
On the bared rocks around me lie,-
Charity
© William Cowper
Fairest and foremost of the train that wait
On man's most dignified and happiest state,
A Sunset
© Victor Marie Hugo
I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,
Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,
The End Of The Play
© William Makepeace Thackeray
The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter's bell:
Dont Ask Me Why
© Alexander Pushkin
Dont ask me why, alone in dismal thought,
In times of mirth, Im often filled with strife,
And why my weary stare is so distraught,
And why I dont enjoy the dream of life;
Quart Pot Creek.
© James Brunton Stephens
ON an evening ramble lately, as I wandered on sedately,
Linking curious fancies, modern, mediaeval, and antique,
