Time poems
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Song of the Galley-Slaves
© Rudyard Kipling
(‘“The Finest Story in the World”’—Many Inventions)
We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low.
Lines
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
At the Portals of the Future,
Full of madness, guilt and gloom,
Stood the hateful form of Slavery,
Crying, Give, Oh! give me room
Cabin
© Anne Waldman
eviction people arrive to haunt me
with descriptions of summer’s wildflowers
how they are carpet of fierce colors
Beowulf (modern English translation)
© Pierre Reverdy
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
from Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza I
© Gertrude Stein
I caught a bird which made a ball
And they thought better of it.
House: Some Instructions
© Grace Paley
If you have a house
you must think about it all the time
as you reside in the house so
it must be a home in your mind
The Erotic Philosophers
© John Betjeman
It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
Amoretti LXXI: I joy to see how in your drawen work
© Edmund Spenser
I joy to see how in your drawen work,
Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare;
The Cleaving
© Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
A Plagued Journey
© Jon Anderson
There is no warning rattle at the door
nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.
[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up
© Bernadette Mayer
Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)
© Emily Dickinson
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Passing Through
© Ai
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
