Morning poems
/ page 257 of 310 /
The Keys of Morning
© Walter de la Mare
While at her bedroom window once,
Learning her task for school,
Little Louisa lonely sat
In the morning clear and cool,
Tartary
© Walter de la Mare
If I were Lord of Tartary,
Myself, and me alone,
My bed should be of ivory,
Of beaten gold my throne;
Where?
© Helen Hunt Jackson
My snowy eupatorium has dropped
Its silver threads of petals in the night;
No signal told its blossoming had stopped;
Its seed-films flutter silent, ghostly white:
No answer stirs the shining air,
As I ask, "Where?"
September
© Helen Hunt Jackson
1 The golden-rod is yellow;
2 The corn is turning brown;
3 The trees in apple orchards
4 With fruit are bending down.
October's Bright Blue Weather
© Helen Hunt Jackson
O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;
New Year's Morning
© Helen Hunt Jackson
Only a night from old to new!
Never a night such changes brought.
The Old Year had its work to do;
No New Year miracles are wrought.
Crossed Threads
© Helen Hunt Jackson
The silken threads by viewless spinners spun,
Which float so idly on the summer air,
And help to make each summer morning fair,
Shining like silver in the summer sun,
A Calendar of Sonnets: November
© Helen Hunt Jackson
This is the treacherous month when autumn days
With summer's voice come bearing summer's gifts.
Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts
Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze
In A Light Time
© Philip Levine
The alder shudders in the April winds
off the moon. No one is awake and yet
sunlight streams across
the hundred still beds
Green Thumb
© Philip Levine
Shake out my pockets! Harken to the call
Of that calm voice that makes no sound at all!
Take of me all you can; my average weight
May make amends for this, my low estate.
Then
© Philip Levine
A solitary apartment house, the last one
before the boulevard ends and a dusty road
winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor
through the dusty windows Karen beholds
Salts And Oils
© Philip Levine
In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog
believing it was Peking duck. Later,
in Tampa I bunked with an insane sailor
who kept a .38 Smith and Wesson in his shorts.
Picture Postcard From The Other World
© Philip Levine
Since I don't know who will be reading
this or even if it will be read, I must
invent someone on the other end
of eternity, a distant cousin laboring
Red Dust
© Philip Levine
This harpie with dry red curls
talked openly of her husband,
his impotence, his death, the death
of her lover, the birth and death
The Rat Of Faith
© Philip Levine
A blue jay poses on a stake
meant to support an apple tree
newly planted. A strong wind
on this clear cold morning
Black Stone On Top Of Nothing
© Philip Levine
Still sober, César Vallejo comes home and finds a black ribbon
around the apartment building covering the front door.
He puts down his cane, removes his greasy fedora, and begins
to untangle the mess. His neighbors line up behind him
Fist
© Philip Levine
Iron growing in the dark,
it dreams all night long
and will not work. A flower
that hates God, a child
tearing at itself, this one
closes on nothing.
The Return
© Philip Levine
All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
The Negatives
© Philip Levine
On March 1, 1958, four deserters from the French Army of North Africa,
August Rein, Henri Bruette, Jack Dauville, & Thomas Delain, robbed a
government pay station at Orleansville. Because of the subsequent
confession of Dauville the other three were captured or shot. Dauville
was given his freedom and returned to the land of his birth, the U.S.A.
Voyages
© Philip Levine
Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart --
I walk by sedge and brown river rot
to where the old lake boats went daily out.
All the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen
