Poetry poems
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Marginalia by Deborah Warren : American Life in Poetry #219 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
As we all know, getting older isn't hard to do. Time continues on. In this poem, Deborah Warren of Massachusetts asks us to think about the life lived between our past and present selves, as indicated in the marginal comments of an old book. There's something beautiful about books allowing us to talk to who we once were, and this poem captures this beauty.
Marginalia
Sordello: Book the Third
© Robert Browning
Whereat he rose.
The level wind carried above the firs
Clouds, the irrevocable travellers,
Onward.
from the Ansty Experience
© Rg Gregory
(a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
welsh experience
© Rg Gregory
called out by the sun
this easter saturday morning
i'm sitting on a bank
in pistyllgwyn
A Terre
© Wilfred Owen
Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.
To Mr. Vaughan, Silurist on His Poems
© Katherine Philips
Had I ador'd the multitude, and thence
Got an antipathy to wit and sence,
And hug'd that fate, in hope the world would grant
'Twas good -- affection to be ignorant;
Eyewash
© Niall Montgomery
EYES always open eyes
onions we were all found under
eyes never in a hurry wait for me
blink at the smash preserve the negative hold on a minute
(we are taking actuality as a section through sentiment at that point)
To Jessica, Gone Back To The City
© Ellis Parker Butler
But, with fun aside, you know,
Were blamed sorry she must go;
An we hope shell think, maybe,
Z well o us ez we o she.
Four Quartets 2: East Coker
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Tomes
© Billy Collins
There is a section in my library for death
and another for Irish history,
a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,
and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books,
The Poet's Corner
© Laura Riding Jackson
And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.
The Hudson
© Luis Benitez
Now nobody says "horse"
and there is a new colt in the world.
From now on, damn, bless,
the bread that you take to your mouth will taste of contradiction.
Let Ezra Pound Speak
© Luis Benitez
If you have nothing to say keep silent
let Ezra Pound speak
from the shadows the splendid old man
from the fine water line
Depressed By A Book Of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward An Unused Pasture And Invite The Insects To Join Me
© James Wright
Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Transcription Of Organ Music
© Allen Ginsberg
The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the
kitchen crooked to take a place in the light,
the closet door opened, because I used it before, it
kindly stayed open waiting for me, its owner.
Nagasaki Days
© Allen Ginsberg
Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
-- am I going to stop that?
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
A Crazed Girl
© William Butler Yeats
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'
Thing Language
© Jack Spicer
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
