Time poems
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Playthings
© Anselm Hollo
Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all the morning.
I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig.
A Winter Song
© Jean Ingelow
Came the dread Archer up yonder lawn —
Night is the time for the old to die —
But woe for an arrow that smote the fawn,
When the hind that was sick unscathed went by.
The Haunted Oak
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
Prodigy
© Charles Simic
It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
© Gwendolyn Brooks
He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat
Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat
And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.
Perspectives
© Ronald Stuart Thomas
They were bearded
like the sea they came
from; rang stone bells
for their stone hearers.
from A Ballad Upon A Wedding
© Sir John Suckling
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen;
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake, or fair.
The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80
© Howard Nemerov
“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.”
—The Insight Lady
Mingus in Diaspora
© William Matthews
You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out,
like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon,
or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost,
who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus.
Helen: A Revision
© Jack Spicer
And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost
And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost
Hope the cost.
The Rescue
© Robert Creeley
The man sits in a timelessness
with the horse under him in time
to a movement of legs and hooves
upon a timeless sand.
Sad Wine (I)
© Cesare Pavese
It was beautiful how he cried as he told it,
the way a drunk cries, his whole body to it,
and he hung on my shoulder saying, Between us,
always respect, and there I was, shaking with cold,
wanting to leave, and helping him walk.
Sonnet LXXVI: Why is my verse so barren of new pride
© William Shakespeare
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
To Catullus
© John Hall Wheelock
Would that you were alive today, Catullus!
Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us,
A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk,
Of no least sorry use on earth, but only
Fit in fancy to justify the outlay
Of your most horrible vocabulary.
For Christmas Day: Hark! the Herald Angels Sing
© Charles Wesley
Hark! the herald Angels sing,
Glory to the new-born King,
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinner reconcild.
Hark! the herald Angels sing,
Glory to the new-born King.
Makeup on Empty Space
© Anne Waldman
I am putting makeup on empty space
all patinas convening on empty space
