Poetry poems
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Poem of Disconnected Parts
© Robert Pinsky
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
How to Continue
© John Ashbery
Oh there once was a woman
and she kept a shop
selling trinkets to tourists
not far from a dock
who came to see what life could be
far back on the island.
Rotting Symbols
© Eileen Myles
Soon I shall take more
I will get more light
and I'll know what I think
about that
Spinning by Kevin Griffith : American Life in Poetry #217 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
American literature is rich with poems about the passage of time, and the inevitability of change, and how these affect us. Here is a poem by Kevin Griffith, who lives in Ohio, in which the years accelerate by their passing.
Spinning
George Moore
© Marianne Clarke Moore
So far as the future is concerned,
Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher,
How is one to know what one doesnt know?
So far as the present is concerned,
Poems
© Anselm Hollo
i
thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
ii
Follow Thy Fair Sun
© Thomas Campion
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow.
When Lydia Smiles
© Madison Julius Cawein
Ah, me! what were this world to me
Without her smile!--What poetry,
What glad hesperian paths I find
Of love, that lead my soul and mind
To happy hills of Arcady,
When Lydia smiles!
Pro Femina
© John Betjeman
But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.
So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?
We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,
Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then
For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine
Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting.
Adam’s Curse
© William Butler Yeats
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
The Letter From Home by Nancyrose Houston : American Life in Poetry #252 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laure
© Ted Kooser
My grandfather, when in his nineties, wrote me a letter in which he listed everything he and my uncle had eaten in the past week. That was the news. I love this poem by Nancyrose Houston of Seattle for the way it plays with the character of those letters from home that many of us have received.
Not All There
© Robert Frost
I turned to speak to God,
About the world’s despair;
But to make bad matters worse,
I found God wasn’t there.
Green Tea by Dale Ritterbusch: American Life in Poetry #83 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Poems of simple pleasure, poems of quiet celebration, well, they aren't anything like those poems we were asked to wrestle with in high school, our teachers insisting that we get a headlock on THE MEANING. This one by Dale Ritterbusch of Wisconsin is more my cup of tea.
An Essay on Criticism: Part 1
© Alexander Pope
But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a critic's noble name,
Be sure your self and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.
Burns
© Fitz-Greene Halleck
WILD ROSE of Alloway! my thanks:
Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon
When first we met upon "the banks
And braes o'bonny Doon."
Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier
© Rupert Brooke
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
