Music poems
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Music To Me Is Like Days
© Les Murray
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
Amanda's Painting
© Les Murray
In the painting, I'm seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I'm
The New Hieroglyphics
© Les Murray
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
Such Singing in the Wild Branches
© Mary Oliver
It was spring
and finally I heard him
among the first leaves -
then I saw him clutching the limb
Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches
© Mary Oliver
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives -
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?
A Dream of Trees
© Mary Oliver
There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
The Swan
© Mary Oliver
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
The Chance To Love Everything
© Mary Oliver
All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby ---
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
Music
© Mary Oliver
I tied together
a few slender reeds, cut
notches to breathe across and made
such music you stood
shock still and then
When Death Comes
© Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
The Irreparable
© Charles Baudelaire
AN we suppress the old Remorse
Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,
Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,
Or as the acorn on the oak?
The Sky
© Charles Baudelaire
WHERE'ER he be, on water or on land,
Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;
One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,
Shadowy beggar or Cr?sus rich with gold;
Music
© Charles Baudelaire
MUSIC doth uplift me like a sea
Towards my planet pale,
Then through dark fogs or heaven's infinity
I lift my wandering sail.
A Former Life
© Charles Baudelaire
LONG since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.
The Temptation
© Charles Baudelaire
THE Demon, in my chamber high,
This morning came to visit me,
And, thinking he would find some fault,
He whispered: "I would know of thee
My Earlier Life
© Charles Baudelaire
I've been home a long time among the vast porticos,
Which the mariner sun has tinged with a million fires,
Whose grandest pillars, upright, majestic and cold
Render them the same, this evening, as caves with basalt spires.
Wordsworth
© Henry Van Dyke
But thou in youth hast known the breaking stress
Of passion, and hast trod despair's dry ground
Beneath black thoughts that wither and destroy.
Ah, wanderer, led by human tenderness
Home to the heart of Nature, thou hast found
The hidden Fountain of Recovered Joy.
War-Music
© Henry Van Dyke
Break off! Dance no more!
Danger is at the door.
Music is in arms.
To signal war's alarms.
Twilight in the Alps
© Henry Van Dyke
Dear is the magic of this hour: she seems
To walk before the dark by falling rills,
And lend a sweeter song to hidden streams;
She opens all the doors of night, and fills
With moving bells the music of my dreams,
That wander far among the sleeping hills.
