Morning poems
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The Sphinx
© Oscar Wilde
In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom.
The Garden Of Eros
© Oscar Wilde
It is full summer now, the heart of June;
Not yet the sunburnt reapers are astir
Upon the upland meadow where too soon
Rich autumn time, the season's usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze.
Charmides
© Oscar Wilde
He was a Grecian lad, who coming home
With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily
Stood at his galley's prow, and let the foam
Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,
And holding wave and wind in boy's despite
Peered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.
My Fancy
© Lewis Carroll
I painted her a gushing thing,
With years about a score;
I little thought to find they were
A least a dozen more;
Silence
© Billy Collins
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
So they stood
© Samuel Menashe
So they stood
Upon ladders
With pruning hooks
Backs to the king
Who took his leave
Of gardening
Preludes
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Yarrow Visited. September, 1814
© André Breton
And is this—Yarrow?—This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
I Am the Woman
© Gerard Malanga
I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker,
Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek,
Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek,
Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker,
Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek,
Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak.
from A Moral Alphabet
© Hilaire Belloc
MORAL
If you were born to walk the ground,
Remain there; do not fool around.
Philosophia Perennis
© Anne Waldman
I turned: quivering yellow stars in blackness
I wept: how speech may save a woman
The picture changes & promises the heroine
That nighttime & meditation are a mirage
A Marriage Poem
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
What does it mean when a woman says,
“my husband,”
if she sits all day in the tub;
if she worries her life like a dog a rat;
if her husband seems familiar but abstract,
a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use.
Sloth
© Yusef Komunyakaa
If you're one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren't worth a bullet,
Jewel Box
© Eamon Grennan
Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
The Operation
© Anne Sexton
Clean of the body’s hair,
I lie smooth from breast to leg.
All that was special, all that was rare
is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
Amoretti LXII: "The weary yeare his race now having run"
© Edmund Spenser
The weary yeare his race now having run,
The new begins his compast course anew:
