Power poems
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A Summer Shower
© Henry Timrod
Welcome, rain or tempest
From yon airy powers,
We have languished for them
Many sultry hours,
And earth is sick and wan, and pines with all her flowers.
Flee On Your Donkey
© Anne Sexton
Today an intern knocks my knees,
testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack
on the stethoscope.
Upon His Majesty's Happy Return
© Edmund Waller
The rising sun complies with our weak sight,
First gilds the clouds, then shows his globe of light
At such a distance from our eyes, as though
He knew what harm his hasty beams would do.
The Shepherd's Calendar - August
© John Clare
Harvest approaches with its bustling day
The wheat tans brown and barley bleaches grey
The Fury Of Cocks
© Anne Sexton
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
Reflex Musings: Reflections From Various Surfaces
© James Clerk Maxwell
In the dense entangled street,
Where the web of Trade is weaving,
Soul-Sickness
© Jones Very
How many of the body's health complain,
When they some deeper malady conceal;
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 02 - part 06
© Torquato Tasso
LXVI
"True labour in the vineyard of thy Lord,
Oh! Mr. Malthus!
© Stephen Leacock
Turn back to Malthus as he walked o'er English Fields and Downs
And walked at night the crooked Streets of crooked English Towns,
Lifeless, undying, Shade or Man, as one that could not die
A hundred years his Shadow fell, a hundred Years to lie,
The Shadow on the Window Pane when Malthus' Ghost went by.
King Charles the Martyr
© John Keble
Praise to our Pardoning God! though silent now
The thunders of the deep prophetic sky,
Though in our sight no powers of darkness bow
Before th Apostles glorious company;
Hurry Up Please It's Time
© Anne Sexton
What is death, I ask.
What is life, you ask.
I give them both my buttocks,
my two wheels rolling off toward Nirvana.
Did I Not Say To You
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Did I not say to you, Go not there, for I am your friend; in this
mirage of annihilation I am the fountain of life?
Admonitions To A Special Person
© Anne Sexton
Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.
Lovers Parted
© Lesbia Harford
Old memories waken old desires
Infallibly. While we're alive
With eye or ear or sense at all,
Sometimes, must love revive.
He Had So Much Work To Do
© Henry Lawson
Jim was trucking for a sawmill to make money for the home,
He was making, out of Mudgee, for the family to come,
And a load-chain snapped the switch-bar, and Black Anderson found Jim,
In the morning, in a creek-bed, with a log on top of him.
Romance Moderne
© William Carlos Williams
Mountains. Elephants humping along
against the skyindifferent to
light withdrawing its tattered shreds,
worn out with embraces. It's
the fillip of novelty. It's a fire in the blood.
Esse Quam Videri
© John Hay
The knightly legend of thy shield betrays
The moral of thy life; a forecast wise,
from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
© William Carlos Williams
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
The Crowd At The Ball Game
© William Carlos Williams
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them
The Princess (part 2)
© Alfred Tennyson
At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
