Morning poems
/ page 155 of 310 /
Hotel François 1er
© Gertrude Stein
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.
Have I come in. Will in suggestion.
They may like hours in catching.
It is always a pleasure to remember.
Midsummer
© Louise Gluck
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off ?the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off ?the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.
Morningside Heights, July
© William Matthews
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
(I found a few old letters...)
© Anselm Hollo
XIV
I found a few old letters of mine carefully hidden in thy boxa few small toys for thy memory to play with. With a timorous heart thou didst try to steal these trifles from the turbulent stream of time which washes away planets and stars, and didst say, These are only mine! Alas, there is no one now who can claim themwho is able to pay their price; yet they are still here. Is there no love in this world to rescue thee from utter loss, even like this love of thine that saved these letters with such fond care?
O woman, thou camest for a moment to my side and touched me with the great mystery of the woman that there is in the heart of creationshe who ever gives back to God his own outflow of sweetness; who is the eternal love and beauty and youth; who dances in bubbling streams and sings in the morning light; who with heaving waves suckles the thirsty earth and whose mercy melts in rain; in whom the eternal one breaks in two in joy that can contain itself no more and overflows in the pain of love.
The Gardener 85
© Anselm Hollo
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 7
© Alfred Tennyson
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
© Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;
"Our sweet companions-sharing your bunk and your bed"
© Marina Tsvetaeva
Our sweet companions—sharing your bunk and your bed
The versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread
The wheels' endless round
The rivers, streaming to ground
The road. . .
Private Beach
© Jane Kenyon
It is always the dispossessed—
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.
Niagara
© Daniel Nester
Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters,
I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation—
From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality,
Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . .
Star
© William Stanley Merwin
All the way north on the train the sun
followed me followed me without moving
Her
© Billy Collins
There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:
I Shall Be Married on Monday Morning
© Pierre Reverdy
As I was walking one morning in spring,
I heard a fair maiden most charmingly sing,
All under her cow, as she sat a-milking,
Saying, I shall be married, next Monday morning.
In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year
© William Stanley Merwin
It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever
Oration: Half-Moon in Vermont
© Norman Dubie
On the broken stairs of a trailer
A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping
Milk from her swollen breasts, cats
Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb
On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning.
Beowulf (modern English translation)
© Pierre Reverdy
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
