Morning poems
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Ode To Tranquillity
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Tranquillity! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame!
Thou ne'er wilt leave my riper age
To low intrigue, or factious rage;
Ready to step into life
© Ivan Donn Carswell
This morning, coffee in hand, standing at the kitchen
window thinking of things that need to be done
I contemplated the post with a lean at the front gate
which I should right one day and wondered why;
The Forlorn
© James Russell Lowell
The night is dark, the stinging sleet,
Swept by the bitter gusts of air,
Drives whistling down the lonely street,
And glazes on the pavement bare.
Mornings Reflections
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Were meetings predestined then ours was intended,
great oracles decreed it as fate, and the auguries chattered
with sweet benefactors and fêted to chance with a face.
We were then both separate and free in our choosing
The Fugitive
© Mary Darby Robinson
Oft have I seen yon Solitary Man
Pacing the upland meadow. On his brow
Retribution
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
When Egypt said, "Exterminate
The males among the Jews,
Fair Goshen's land make desolate
And bid them glad adieus:"
It seldom snowed Part IV
© Ivan Donn Carswell
It seldom snowed they said,
perhaps theyre right
although seldom was never
in that endless summer
Ellen McJones Aberdeen
© William Schwenck Gilbert
MACPHAIRSON CLONGLOCKETTY ANGUS McCLAN
Was the son of an elderly labouring man;
You've guessed him a Scotchman, shrewd reader, at sight,
And p'r'aps altogether, shrewd reader, you're right.
I love you in the morning
© Ivan Donn Carswell
I love you in the morning and at the setting of the sun
And in the hours of darkness before the day's begun
And in my waking solitude to greet the break of dawn
I grant you sleep that extra hour, although you sleep alone.
Forever Alight
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Were meetings destined then this was one
to take a leading place, the oracle decreed it fate
in a matrix of moving matter, and the signs all clattered with
chance fêted as a sweet benefactor. When we were separate
For Siggy & Bill
© Ivan Donn Carswell
so I took him too. I flicked them through,
scanned a few pages, gazed at the ancient
pictures, yawned, left them on the bed
and rediscovered them this morning.
Now I have two books to read
Every Time I laugh Aloud (An Ode to Short People)
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Every time I laugh aloud, who springs to mind but Johnnie Howard?
Cathartic laughter eases stress which Johnnie causes in excess,
so when I hum acerbic lines of Randy Newmans quirky song
dont want no short people round here,
Courage is a motherless lamb
© Ivan Donn Carswell
For a small child crossing the pen alone was a courageous feat,
occasionally, with a maniacal bleat, the wether would burst from cover
and butt whomever graced his yard. He meant it in fun, something
he had done since his bottle-fed youth, he knew no other form of greeting.
Good Night
© Jane Taylor
Little baby, lay your head
On your pretty cradle-bed;
Shut your eye-peeps, now the day
And the light are gone away;
All the clothes are tucked in tight;
Little baby dear, good night.
Camping in a kitchen
© Ivan Donn Carswell
To say weve done it all before is not to bend
the truth and though weve lost our youth
the vision of the bright contemporary kitchen
draws us on, sustaining us beyond our strength.
Athritic Fingers Have To Last
© Ivan Donn Carswell
These painful, cold athritic fingers have to last
much longer yet, theyre all I have to keep the pages
on the screen prescribed with glowing words, my favoured antidote
to weak and skulking weariness; the cups of strong black coffee
After the rain
© Ivan Donn Carswell
And in the morning when the sun returns
to claim the earth the mist surprises, rising
unabashed and clean again to grace the
nascent waiting skies after the rain.
© I.D. Carswell
The Morning Watch
© Jones Very
'Tis near the morning watch, the dim lamp burns
But scarcely shows how dark the slumbering street;
Warble Of Lilac-Time
© Walt Whitman
My mind henceforth, and all its meditations-my recitatives,
My land, my age, my race, for once to serve in songs,
(Sprouts, tokens ever of death indeed the same as life,)
To grace the bush I love-to sing with the birds,
A warble for joy of Lilac-time.
