Smile poems

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369

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.

On The Death Of A Friend's Child

© James Russell Lowell

Death never came so nigh to me before,

Nor showed me his mild face: oft had I mused

Doors, Doors, Doors

© Anne Sexton

Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.

The Dirty Old Man

© William Allingham

In a dirty old house lived a Dirty Old Man;
Soap, towels, or brushes were not in his plan.
For forty long years, as the neighbors declared,
His house never once had been cleaned or repaired.

The Shepherd's Calendar - August

© John Clare

Harvest approaches with its bustling day

The wheat tans brown and barley bleaches grey

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.

Christmas Eve

© Anne Sexton

Oh sharp diamond, my mother!
I could not count the cost
of all your faces, your moods--
that present that I lost.

Invocation

© Alfred Austin

Where Apennine slopes unto Tuscan plain,
And breaks into dimples, and laughs to flowers,
To see where the terrors of Winter wane,
And out of a valley of grape and grain
There blossoms a City of domes and towers,

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.

The Garden

© Edith Nesbit

CHOKED with ill weeds my garden lay a-dying,
Hard was the ground, no bud had heart to blow,
Yet shone your smile there, with your soft breath sighing:
"Have patience, for some day the flowers will grow."

All My Pretty Ones

© Anne Sexton

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.
Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;
here, with the winner's cup at the speedboat races,
here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

Those Foreign Engineers

© Henry Lawson

Old Ivan McIvanovitch, with knitted brow of care,
Has climbed up from the engine-room to get a breath of air;
He slowly wipes the grease and sweat from hairy face and neck.
And from beneath his bushy brows he glowers around the deck.

Wanting to Die

© Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Baby Picture

© Anne Sexton

It's in the heart of the grape
where that smile lies.
It's in the good-bye-bow in the hair
where that smile lies.

Cinderella

© Anne Sexton

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Now to be Still and Rest

Now to be still and rest, while the heart remembers
All that is learned and loved in the days of long past,
To stoop and warm our hands at the fallen embers,
Glad to have come to the long ways end at last.