Mom poems
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Bushwick: Latex Flat by D. Nurkse: American Life in Poetry #179 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-
© Ted Kooser
I've always loved shop talk, with its wonderful language of tools and techniques. This poem by D. Nurkse of Brooklyn, New York, is a perfect example. I especially like the use of the verb, lap, in line seven, because that's exactly the sound a four-inch wall brush makes.
Bushwick: Latex Flat
Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter II
© Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
'Twas thus she comforted her soul. And then,
She had found a friend, a phoenix among men,
Which made it easier to compound with life,
Easier to be a woman and a wife.
Pharsalia - Book IX: Cato
© Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
Such were the words he spake; and soon the fleet
Had dared the angry deep: but Cato's voice
While praising, calmed the youthful chieftain's rage.
Chanson Des Yeux
© André Marie de Chénier
Ne me regarde point; cache, cache tes yeux;
Mon sang en est brûlé; tes regards sont des feux.
Viens, viens. Quoique vivant, et dans ta fleur première,
Je veux avec mes mains te fermer la paupière,
Ou, malgré tes efforts, je prendrai tes cheveux
Pour en faire un bandeau qui te cache les yeux.
Expostulation
© William Cowper
Why weeps the muse for England? What appears
In England's case to move the muse to tears?
Hermann And Dorothea - VIII. Melpomene
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But she conceal'd the pain which she felt, and jestingly spoke thus
"It betokens misfortune,--so scrupulous people inform us,--
For the foot to give way on entering a house, near the threshold.
I should have wish'd, in truth, for a sign of some happier omen!
Let us tarry a little, for fear your parents should blame you
For their limping servant, and you should be thought a bad landlord."
Sonnet IV
© Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;
The Borough. Letter XIX: The Parish-Clerk
© George Crabbe
WITH our late Vicar, and his age the same,
His clerk, hight Jachin, to his office came;
The like slow speech was his, the like tall slender
My Annual
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
How long will this harp which you once loved to hear
Cheat your lips of a smile or your eyes of a tear?
How long stir the echoes it wakened of old,
While its strings were unbroken, untarnished its gold?
The Power of Science
© James Brunton Stephens
"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,"
The Bell-Founder Part III - Vicissitude And Rest
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
O Erin! thou broad-spreading valley--thou well-watered land of fresh
streams,
When I gaze on thy hills greenly sloping, where the light of such
loveliness beams,
Why Should I Be Bitter
© Saigyo
Why should I be bitter
About someone who was
A complete stranger
Until a certain moment
In a day that has passed.
A Prayer
© Archibald Lampman
Oh mother, who wast long before our day,
And after us full many an age shalt be.
Careworn and blind, we wander from thy way:
Born of thy strength, yet weak and halt are we
Grant us, oh mother, therefore, us who pray,
Some little of thy light and majesty.
Natures Way
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
If thou didst slip 'neath the encircling wave
And found sure death in coral groves below,
Shop Girl
© Ezra Pound
For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall,
And they talk of Swinburne's women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.
And the harlots of Baudelaire.
Geraint And Enid
© Alfred Tennyson
Then Enid pondered in her heart, and said:
'I will go back a little to my lord,
And I will tell him all their caitiff talk;
For, be he wroth even to slaying me,
Far liefer by his dear hand had I die,
Than that my lord should suffer loss or shame.'
The Creek of the Four Graves [Early Version]
© Charles Harpur
And feeling thus by habit, that poor man
Though the black shadow of untimely death
Hopelessly thickened under every stroke,
Upstruggled desperate, until at last,
One, as in mercy, gave him to the dust,
With all his sorrows.
To H. C.
© William Wordsworth
SIX YEARS OLD
O THOU! whose fancies from afar are brought;
Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel,
And fittest to unutterable thought
To The Countess Of Blessington
© George Gordon Byron
You have ask'd for a verse:--the request
In a rhymer 'twere strange to deny;
But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.
