Smile poems
/ page 319 of 369 /
Europe, MDCCCCI To Napoleon
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Soars still thy spirit, Child of Fire?
Dost hear the camps of Europe hum?
On eagle wings dost hover nigher
At the far rolling of the drum?
To see the harvest thou hast sown
Smilest thou now, Napoleon?
Emancipation Hymn
© Anonymous
Praise we the Lord! let songs resound
To earths remotest shore!
Songs of thanksgiving, songs of praise
For we are slaves no more.
With Tenure
© David Lehman
If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
Reconciliation
© Madison Julius Cawein
LISTEN, dearest! you must love me more,
More than you did before!
Hark, what a beating here of wings!
Never at rest,
April 24
© David Lehman
Did you know that Evian spelled backwards is naive?
I myself was unaware of this fact until last Tuesday night
when John Ashbery, Marc Cohen, and Eugene Richie
gave a poetry reading and I introduced them
Operation Memory
© David Lehman
We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.
To Psyche
© David Lehman
The longer I stare the lovelier
you look in my eyes (so made such
mirrors and spies) and I'm not done
yet as I enumerate the virtues
Wittgenstein's Ladder
© David Lehman
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
To William Holden
© David Lehman
(July 15) We know who
the guards are
in those POW
movies with brutal
A Birthday
© Alfred Austin
I love to think, when first I woke
Into this wondrous world,
The leaves were fresh on elm and oak,
And hawthorns laced and pearled.
To A Blank Sheet Of Paper
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
WAN-VISAGED thing! thy virgin leaf
To me looks more than deadly pale,
Unknowing what may stain thee yet,--
A poem or a tale.
Sonnet XIII: Phoebus Was Judge
© Sir Philip Sidney
Phoebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love,
Of those three gods, whose arms the fairest were:
Jove's golden shield did eagle sables bear,
Whose talons held young Ganymede above:
The Poet
© Lucy Maud Montgomery
There was strength in him and the weak won freely from it,
There was an infinite pity, and hard hearts grew soft thereby,
There was truth so unshrinking and starry-shining,
Men read clear by its light and learned to scorn a lie.
The Cavalier's March To London
© Thomas Babbington Macaulay
To horse! to horse! brave Cavaliers!
To horse for Church and Crown!
March
© Isabella Valancy Crawford
Shall Thor with his hammer
Beat on the mountain,
As on an anvil,
A shackle and fetter?
Song
© Emily Jane Brontë
The linnet in the rocky dells,
The moor-lark in the air,
The bee among the heather bells
That hide my lady fair:
Venetian Life
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
The meaning of somber and barren
Venetian life is clear to me:
Now she looks into a decrepit blue glass
With a cool smile.
