Pet poems
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Come Up from the Fields Father
© Walt Whitman
Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
The Lady’s Dressing Room
© Jonathan Swift
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The Metal and the Flower
© P. K. Page
Intractable between them grows
a garden of barbed wire and roses.
Burning briars like flames devour
their too innocent attire.
Dare they meet, the blackened wire
tears the intervening air.
Bitch
© John Betjeman
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
You Also, Nightingale
© Reginald Shepherd
Petrarch dreams of pebbles
on the tongue, he loves me
at a distance, black polished stone
skipping the lake that swallows
The Two Children
© Emily Jane Brontë
Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away;
Ornithogalum Dubium
© Roddy Lumsden
Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace
with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
Perspectives
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
They were bearded
like the sea they came
from; rang stone bells
for their stone hearers.
from A Ballad Upon A Wedding
© Sir John Suckling
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen;
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake, or fair.
To the Light of September
© William Stanley Merwin
When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not
A Friend Killed in the War
© Anthony Evan Hecht
In the clean brightness of magnesium
Flares, there were seven angels by a tree.
Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt
They were not really from Elysium.
And his flesh opened like a peony,
Red at the heart, white petals furling out.
