Time poems
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Dilemma
© Dorothy Parker
If I were mild, and I were sweet,
And laid my heart before your feet,
And took my dearest thoughts to you,
And hailed your easy lies as true;
The Meadows In Spring
© Edward Fitzgerald
'Tis a dull sight
To see the year dying,
When winter winds
Set the yellow wood sighing:
Sighing, oh! sighing.
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam Of Naishapur
© Edward Fitzgerald
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
A Letter from Artemesia in the Town to Chloe in the Country
© John Wilmot
Chloe,In verse by your command I write.
Shortly you'll bid me ride astride, and fight:
These talents better with our sex agree
Than lofty flights of dangerous poetry.
A Fragment of Seneca Translated
© John Wilmot
After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Satyr
© John Wilmot
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare,
A Satyre on Charles II
© John Wilmot
[Rochester had to flee the court for several months
after handing this to the King by mistake.]
In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
A Satyre Against Mankind
© John Wilmot
Thus sir, you see what human nature craves,
Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves;
The difference lies, as far as I can see.
Not in the thing itself, but the degree;
And all the subject matter of debate
Is only, who's a knave of the first rate
Love and Life
© John Wilmot
All my past life is mine no more,
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams giv'n o'er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.
A Ramble in St. James's Park
© John Wilmot
The second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
An Allusion to Horace
© John Wilmot
Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes,
Were stoln, unequal, nay dull many times:
What foolish Patron, is there found of his,
So blindly partial, to deny me this?
By All Love's Soft, Yet Mighty Powers
© John Wilmot
By all love's soft, yet mighty powers,
It is a thing unfit,
That men should fuck in time of flowers,
Or when the smock's beshit.
Moonlight
© Vita Sackville-West
-- Then earth's great architecture swells
Among her mountains and her fells
Under the moon to amplitude
Massive and primitive and rude:
Cockspur Bush
© Les Murray
I am lived. I am died.
I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,
but then I was stemmed and multiplied,
sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,
Shower
© Les Murray
From the metal poppy
this good blast of trance
arriving as shock, private cloudburst blazing down,
worst in a boarding-house greased tub, or a barrack with competitions,
The New Hieroglyphics
© Les Murray
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
© Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
The Meaning Of Existence
© Les Murray
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Travels With John Hunter
© Les Murray
We who travel between worlds
lose our muscle and bone.
I was wheeling a barrow of earth
when agony bayoneted me.
Epistle to Neruda
© Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Superb,
Like a seasoned lion,
Neruda buys bread in the shop.
He asks for it to be wrapped in paper
