Pet poems
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Prayer of Columbus.
© Walt Whitman
A BATTERD, wreckd old man,
Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,
Pent by the sea, and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
Sore, stiff with many toils, sickend, and nigh to death,
An Asphodel
© Allen Ginsberg
O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
...how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality...
Death & Fame
© Allen Ginsberg
When I die
I don't care what happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
Sacrifices
© Richard Jones
All winter the fire devoured everything --
tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers.
When April finally arrived,
I opened the woodstove one last time
A Man Young And Old: VII. The Friends Of His Youth
© William Butler Yeats
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
A Man Young And Old: VIII. Summer And Spring
© William Butler Yeats
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
Solomon And The Witch
© William Butler Yeats
And thus declared that Arab lady:
'Last night, where under the wild moon
On grassy mattress I had laid me,
Within my arms great Solomon,
The Fiddler Of Dooney
© William Butler Yeats
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.
The Ballad Of Father Gilligan
© William Butler Yeats
The old priest Peter Gilligan
Was weary night and day;
For half his flock were in their beds,
Or under green sods lay.
Byzantium
© William Butler Yeats
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
Epitaph
© Dorothy Parker
The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the new moon's cup.I dared not look on the sweet young rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.The next time I died, they laid me deep.
August
© Dorothy Parker
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
Flowering Eucalypt In Autumn
© Les Murray
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
The Quality Of Sprawl
© Les Murray
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Travels With John Hunter
© Les Murray
We who travel between worlds
lose our muscle and bone.
I was wheeling a barrow of earth
when agony bayoneted me.
Stanley Kunitz
© Mary Oliver
I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
Daisies
© Mary Oliver
It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
Yes! No!
© Mary Oliver
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.
Bien Loin D'ici
© Charles Baudelaire
HERE is the chamber consecrate,
Wherein this maiden delicate,
And enigmatically sedate,
