Strength poems
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Your Voices Joined Is All It Takes
© Ivan Donn Carswell
They came in masted wooden ships across
an unindentured sea and cast their lot in ocean
swells to chance at history, and Sovereign power
commanded thus they rot in purgatory.
We, The Living
© Ivan Donn Carswell
There were moments when we rose above despair
borne by strength of spirit in your name,
but tragedy remained in darkened shadow's
gloom beneath your widow's eyes.
To The Rock That Will Be A Cornerstone Of The House
© Robinson Jeffers
Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
How long a rime since the brown people who have vanished from
Talk to me of love
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Talk to me of love with wonder in your eyes,
of limber magic flying through the veiling air
and soft-edged silks trailing in a vintage plume,
the bloom of fragrant lavender intimate in your hair
Desires that you can only tame to know
© Ivan Donn Carswell
"Zipless sex" one cynic called
this festival of fornication,
this celebration of new-found sexual strength
and urbane honesty, of sex for sex as sex alone
Woodstock Park
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Here in a little rustic hermitage
Alfred the Saxon King, Alfred the Great,
Lethargy of leaden wings
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Sure, I sip my lemon tea with spoon of amber honey,
trying to decide which things to do, things I didnt need
to think about before this day, praying for the strength
to ride these doldrums out, to see them to their squalid end.
Krishna And His Three Handmaidens
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AND where he sat beneath the mystic stars,
Nigh the twin founts of Immortality,
That feed fair channels of the Stream of Trance,--
To Krishna once his three handmaidens came,
Burns
© Charles Harpur
MY OWN WILD BURNS! these rude-wrought rhymes of thine
In golden worth are like the unshapely coin
Of some new realm, yet pure as from the mine
And Art may well be spared with such alloy
As dims the bullion to improve the die!
Dreams of a lifetime
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Ronald Hi Khong Wong is gone,
sadly he deceased
the commencement of this week.
It wasnt unexpected.
Camping in a kitchen
© Ivan Donn Carswell
To say weve done it all before is not to bend
the truth and though weve lost our youth
the vision of the bright contemporary kitchen
draws us on, sustaining us beyond our strength.
The Thread
© Denise Levertov
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
The Bastille: A Vision
© Helen Maria Williams
"Drear cell! along whose lonely bounds,
Unvisited by light,
Chill silence dwells with night,
Save where the clanging fetter sounds!
The Spirit Of Great Joan
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Back of each soldier who fights for France,
Aye, back of each woman and man
Of The Nature Of Things: Book I - Part 05 - Character Of The Atoms
© Lucretius
So primal germs have solid singleness
Nor otherwise could they have been conserved
Through aeons and infinity of time
For the replenishment of wasted worlds.
Evangeline: Preface
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
The Banks Of Wye - Book I
© Robert Bloomfield
No butler's proxies snore supine,
Where the old monarch kept his wine;
No Welch ox roasting, horns and all,
Adorns his throng'd and laughing hall;
But where he pray'd, and told his beads,
A thriving ash luxuriant spreads.
The House Of Dust: Part 04: 03: Palimpsest: A Deceitful Portrait
© Conrad Aiken
Or 'one day dies eventless as another,
Leaving the seeker still unsatisfied,
And more convinced life yields no satisfaction'?
Or 'seek too hard, the sight at length grows callous,
And beauty shines in vain'?
Sonnet 36: Stella, Whence Doth This
© Sir Philip Sidney
Stella, whence doth this new assault arise,
A conquer'd, yielden, ransack'd heart to win?
Whereto long since through my long batter'd eyes,
Whole armies of thy beauties entered in.
