Time poems
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The Caveman on the Train
© Daniel Nester
When first the apprizing eye and tongue that muttered
(Banished from Eden’s air? Or pride of apes?)
Idea LXI
© Michael Drayton
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
Granddaughter
© Robinson Jeffers
And heres a portrait of my granddaughter Una
When she was two years old: a remarkable painter,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
from The Triumph of Love
© Geoffrey Hill
Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead. Too bad. So how
much more does he have of injury time?
The Old Codger’s Lament
© Carl Rakosi
Who can say now,
“When I was young, the country was very beautiful?
Oaks and willows grew along the rivers
and there were many herbs and flowering bushes.
The forests were so dense the deer slipped through
the cottonwoods and maples unseen.”
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The Waste Carpet
© William Matthews
O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.
Sonnet CIX: O! never say that I was false of heart
© William Shakespeare
O! never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
Sisters in Arms
© Elizabeth Daryush
Keys jingle in the door ajar threatening
whatever is coming belongs here
I reach for your sweetness
but silence explodes like a pregnant belly
into my face
a vomit of nevers.
from Rites of Passage
© Robert Duncan
Irregular meters beat between your heart and mine.
Snuffling the air you take the heat and scan
the lines you take in going as if I were or were not there
and overtake me.
And where it seems but yesterday I spilld the wine,
you too grow beastly to become a man.
This Room and Everything in It
© Li-Young Lee
Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.
The Secular Masque
© John Dryden
JANUS
Since Momus comes to laugh below,
Old Time begin the show,
That he may see, in every scene,
What changes in this age have been,
Mothers
© Nikki Giovanni
the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books
Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
September Notebook: Stories
© Robert Hass
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
