Morning poems
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Intimations Of The Beautiful
© Madison Julius Cawein
The hills are full of prophecies
And ancient voices of the dead;
Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
Pale, visionary presences,
That speak the things no tongue hath said,
No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.
I Will Make You Brooches
© Robert Louis Stevenson
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
A Hymn to Childhood
© Li-Young Lee
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
Because of this Modest Style
© Ramon Lopez Velarde
May you be blessed, modest, magnificent;
you have possessed the highest summit of my heart,
you who are at once the artist
of lowly and most lofty things, who bear in your hands
my life as if it was your work of art!
Falling Leaves and Early Snow
© Kenneth Rexroth
In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
Gertrude's Prayer
© Rudyard Kipling
That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine-
Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe.
Exultation
© Emma Lazarus
BEHOLD, I walked abroad at early morning,
The fields of June were bathed in dew and lustre,
The hills were clad with light as with a garment.
The Lark
© Jim Carroll
You said that you loved the lark more than any other bird because of its straight flight toward the sun. That is how I wanted our flight to be.
Albatrosses fly over the sea, intoxicated by salt and iodine. They are like unfettered waves playing in the air, but they do not lose touch with the other waves.
Storks make long journeys; they cast shadows over the Earths face. But like albatrosses, they fly horizontally, resting in the hills.
Only the lark leaps out of ruts like a live dart, and rises, swallowed by the heavens. Then the sky feels as though the Earth itself has risen. Heavy jungles below do not answer the lark. Mountains crucified over the flatlands do not answer.
I Am Learning To Abandon the World
© Linda Pastan
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Bindweed by James McKean: American Life in Poetry #62 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Gardeners who've fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in the poem. It's an endless struggle, and in the end, of course, the bindweed wins.
The Spirit Of The Snow
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
The night brings forth the morn-
Of the cloud is lightning born;
From out the darkest earth the brightest roses grow.
Bright sparks from black flints fly,
And from out a leaden sky
Comes the silvery-footed Spirit of the Snow.
Verses On Rome
© Frances Anne Kemble
O Rome, tremendous! who, beholding thee,
Shall not forget the bitterest private grief
Modern Love: XLVI
© George Meredith
At last we parley: we so strangely dumb
In such a close communion! It befell
Pauline, A Fragment of a Question
© Robert Browning
And I can love nothing-and this dull truth
Has come the last: but sense supplies a love
Encircling me and mingling with my life.
Year’s End
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
The fingers lie in the lap,
separate, lonely, as in the field
the separate blades of grass
shrivel or grow tall.
Little Gray Songs from St. Josephs
© Grace Fallow Norton
I
WITH cassock black, baret and book,
Father Saran goes by;
I think he goes to say a prayer
For one who has to die.
The Enemies
© Elizabeth Jennings
Last night they came across the river and
Entered the city. Women were awake
With lights and food. They entertained the band,
Not asking what the men had come to take
Or what strange tongue they spoke
Or why they came so suddenly through the land.
Some Beasts
© Pablo Neruda
A monkey is weaving
a thread of insatiable lusts
on the margins of morning:
he topples a pollen-fall,
startles the violet-flight
of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.
