Poetry poems
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Fresh Air
© Kenneth Koch
3
Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.”
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney
Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle,
But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea.
A Prayer for Rain
© Paul Eluard
Let it come down: these thicknesses of air
have long enough walled love away from love;
The Dream
© Caroline Norton
Ah! bless'd are they for whom 'mid all their pains
That faithful and unalter'd love remains;
Who, Life wreck'd round them,--hunted from their rest,--
And, by all else forsaken or distress'd,--
Claim, in one heart, their sanctuary and shrine--
As I, my Mother, claim'd my place in thine!
The Beauty of Things
© Robinson Jeffers
To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of thingsearth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars
Snip Your Hair by Regina DeSalva: American Life in Poetry #128 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2
© Ted Kooser
Our poet this week is 16-year-old Devon Regina DeSalva of Los Angeles, California, who says she wrote this poem to get back at her mother, only to find that her mother loved the poem.
Snip Your Hair
Torment
© Daisy Fried
“I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck,
talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children,
What The Chairman Told Tom
© Basil Bunting
Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
To Katharine: At Fourteen Months by Joelle Biele: American Life in Poetry #174 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet
© Ted Kooser
I'd guess you've all seen a toddler hold something over the edge of a high-chair and then let it drop, just for the fun of it. Here's a lovely picture of a small child learning the laws of physics. The poet, Joelle Biele, lives in Maryland.
We Eat Out Together
© Bernadette Mayer
My heart is a fancy place
Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers
Heart by Rick Campbell: American Life in Poetry #169 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
I remember being scared to death when, at about thirty years of age, I saw an x-ray of my skull. Seeing one's self as a skeleton, or receiving any kind of medical report, even when the news is good, can be unsettling. Suddenly, you're just another body, a clock waiting to stop. Here's a telling poem by Rick Campbell, who lives and teaches in Florida.
Heart
Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoriam Wallace Stevens
© Robert Duncan
“That God is colouring Newton doth shew”—William Blake
Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence. I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence as if there could stand some solidity most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space. The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne.
Mugging (I)
© Allen Ginsberg
I
Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk—
Critic and Poet: an Epilogue
© Emma Lazarus
Oh deeper, higher than he could divine
That all-unearthly, untaught strain! He saw
The plain, brown warbler, unabashed. "Not mine"
(He cried) "the error of this fatal flaw.
No bird is this, it soars beyond my line,
Were it a bird, 'twould answer to my law."
The Spirit Medium
© William Butler Yeats
POETRY, music, I have loved, and yet
Because of those new dead
That come into my soul and escape
Confusion of the bed,
Or those begotten or unbegotten
Perning in a band,
A Day on the Big Branch
© Howard Nemerov
Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
