Poetry poems
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Going Deaf by Miller Williams: American Life in Poetry #209 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I've gotten to the age at which I am starting to strain to hear things, but I am glad to have gotten to that age, all the same. Here's a fine poem by Miller Williams of Arkansas that gets inside a person who is losing her hearing.
Going Deaf
A Letter to a Live Poet
© Rupert Brooke
Sir, since the last Elizabethan died,
Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse,
Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious
Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine,
Ordinary Miracles
© Erica Jong
Spring, rainbows,
ordinary miracles
about which
nothing new can be said.
Julian and Maddalo : A Conversation
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
'On nerveless, tuneless lines how sadly'
© Charles Harpur
ON nerveless, tuneless lines how sadly
Ringing rhymes may wasted be,
Sonnet XV. On The Grasshopper And Cricket
© John Keats
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
Velocity Of Money
© Allen Ginsberg
Im delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows
of Lower East Side
The Spirit Of Poetry
© George Essex Evans
She is the flower-maid of the dreaming noon,
The goddess of the temple of the night;
Where the berg-turrets gleam beneath the moon
She builds Her throne of white.
Mother, Washing Dishes by Susan Meyers : American Life in Poetry #267 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
© Ted Kooser
Here’s a poem by Susan Meyers, of South Carolina, about the most ordinary of activities, washing the dishes, but in this instance remembering this ordinary routine provides an opportunity for speculation about the private pleasures of a lost parent.
Faith
© Nikola Vaptsarov
Pray, how will you smash it?
With bullets?
No! That is useless!
Stop! It is not worth it!
Book Fifth-Books
© William Wordsworth
There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!--many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,
163. On Elphinstones Translation of Martials Epigrams
© Robert Burns
O THOU whom Poetry abhors,
Whom Prose has turnèd out of doors,
Heardst thou yon groan?proceed no further,
Twas laureld Martial calling murther.
Where They Lived by Marge Saiser: American Life in Poetry #104 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
At some time many of us will have to make a last visit to a house where aged parents lived out their days. Here Marge Saiser beautifully compresses one such farewell.
Where They Lived
328. Poem on Pastoral Poetry
© Robert Burns
Thy rural loves are Natures sel;
Nae bombast spates o nonsense swell;
Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell
O witchin love,
That charm that can the strongest quell,
The sternest move.
My Mother’s Pillow by Cecilia Woloch : American Life in Poetry #228 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laur
© Ted Kooser
I don’t often mention literary forms, but of this lovely poem by Cecilia Woloch I want to suggest that the form, a villanelle, which uses a pattern of repetition, adds to the enchantment I feel in reading it. It has a kind of layering, like memory itself. Woloch lives and teaches in southern California.
My Mother’s Pillow
Called Into Play
© Archie Randolph Ammons
Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roadsand lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going tofind something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, lookdown, look up, look close, think, think, think:
To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time
© Countee Cullen
I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year's song and next year's bliss.
At the Grave by Jonathan Greene: American Life in Poetry #2 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Many of us have felt helpless when we've tried to assist friends who are dealing with the deaths of loved ones. Here the Kentucky poet and publisher, Jonathan Greene, conveys that feeling of inadequacy in a single sentence. The brevity of the poem reflects the measured and halting speech of people attempting to offer words of condolence:
At the Grave
