Time poems
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Saturday’s Child
© Countee Cullen
Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
With the stars strung for a rattle;
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon—
For implements of battle.
There Is No Word
© Tony Hoagland
There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers
Sonnet CXXVI: O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy powr
© William Shakespeare
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy powr
Dost hold times fickle glass his sickle hour,
Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds
© William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Becune Point
© Derek Walcott
Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows
hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.
Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse
or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers
Beyond Hammonton
© Stephen Dunn
The back roads I’ve traveled late
at night, alone, a little drunk,
wishing I were someone
on whom nothing is lost,
a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore
© Charles Bukowski
but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,
and all thanks to an ugly horse
who wrote this poem.
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
The Two Children
© Emily Jane Brontë
Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away;
Paradise Lost: Book VII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine
Sway
© Louis Simpson
Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye
Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname:
there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex,
and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra,
two sisters, Swing and Sway.
[the Night That Lorca Comes]
© Bob Kaufman
THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES
SHALL BE A STRANGE NIGHT IN THE
The House of Rest
© Julia Ward Howe
I will build a house of rest,
Square the corners every one:
At each angle on his breast
Shall a cherub take the sun;
Rising, risen, sinking, down,
Weaving day’s unequal crown.
It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free
© André Breton
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
The Asians Dying
© William Stanley Merwin
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
The Corn-Stalk Fiddle
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.
