Morning poems
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After the Last Bulletins
© Lola Ridge
After the last bulletins the windows darken
And the whole city founders readily and deep,
Sliding on all its pillows
To the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep,
The Windy City [sections 1 and 6]
© Carl Sandburg
Early the red men gave a name to the river,
the place of the skunk,
the river of the wild onion smell,
Shee-caw-go.
Dolly
© Robert Bloomfield
The Bat began with giddy wing
His circuit round the Shed, the Tree;
And clouds of dancing Gnats to sing
A summer-night's serenity.
Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris
© Duncan Campbell Scott
How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,
The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,
Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,
The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,
Before it begins to ache?
Winter Roses
© John Greenleaf Whittier
My garden roses long ago
Have perished from the leaf-strewn walks;
Their pale, fair sisters smile no more
Upon the sweet-brier stalks.
Creatures
© Billy Collins
Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,
Her Beautiful Eyes
© James Whitcomb Riley
O her beautiful eyes! they are as blue as the dew
On the violet's bloom when the morning is new,
And the light of their love is the gleam of the sun
O'er the meadows of Spring where the quick shadows run:
As the morn shirts the mists and the clouds from the skies--
So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes.
Paradise Lost: Book IX (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
To whom the Virgin Majestie of Eve,
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets,
With sweet austeer composure thus reply'd,
Nostalgia
© Billy Collins
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
© Billy Collins
In the dining room there is a brown fish
hanging on the wall who swims along
in his frame while we are eating dinner.
Haverhill
© John Greenleaf Whittier
O river winding to the sea!
We call the old time back to thee;
From forest paths and water-ways
The century-woven veil we raise.
The Bridal of the Year
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
Yes! the Summer is returning,
Warmer, brighter beams are burning
Fresh Air
© Kenneth Koch
3
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.”
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney
Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle,
But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea.
Epilogue To Shapes & Shadows
© Madison Julius Cawein
Beyond the moon, within a land of mist,
Lies the dim Garden of all Dead Desires,
Walled round with morning's clouded amethyst,
And haunted of the sunset's shadowy fires;
There all lost things we loved hold ghostly tryst--
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
Night Without Sleep
© Robinson Jeffers
The world’s as the world is; the nations rearm and prepare to change; the age of tyrants returns;
The greatest civilization that has ever existed builds itself higher towers on breaking foundations.
Recurrent episodes; they were determined when the ape’s children first ran in packs, chipped flint to an edge.
My Mother’s Pillow
© Cecilia Woloch
My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow;
she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled.
"The Foresters"
© William Watson
Clear as of old the great voice rings to-day,
While Sherwood's oak-leaves twine with Aldworth's bay:
