Time poems
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Seele im Raum
© Randall Jarrell
It is over.
It is over so long that I begin to think
That it did not exist, that I have never—
And my son says, one morning, from the paper:
“An eland. Look, an eland!”
—It was so.
The Tickle
© Gamaliel Bradford
I like to read confessions
As lengthy as Rousseau's,
With all their slow processions
Of innumerable woes.
Address For The Opening Of The Fifth Avenue Theatre
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
HANG out our banners on the stately tower
It dawns at last--the long-expected hour!
The steep is climbed, the star-lit summit won,
The builder's task, the artist's labor done;
Before the finished work the herald stands,
And asks the verdict of your lips and hands!
Messiah (Christmas Portions)
© Mark Doty
A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:
"The Old Psalm Tune"
© Harriet Beecher Stowe
You asked, dear friend, the other day,
Why still my charmed ear
Rejoiceth in uncultured tone
That old psalm tune to hear?
Lines To Six-Foot Three
© George Borrow
A lad, who twenty tongues can talk
And sixty miles a day can walk;
The Magic of Numbers
© Kenneth Koch
The Magic of Numbers—1
How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs!
Contrasted Songs: Song For The Night Of Christ's Resurrection
© Jean Ingelow
(A Humble Imitation)
And birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
Pajama Quotient
© Michael Rosen
Coinage of the not-yet-wholly-
hardened custodians of public
health, as health is roughly measured
?in the rougher parts of Dearborn.
Four Poems for Robin
© Gary Snyder
December at Yase
You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”
A Summons
© Frances Anne Kemble
O thou beloved, by whom I stand,
Straining in mine thy kindred hand,
Farewell!on yonder mountain's brow
I see a beckoning hand of snow;
Stern winter dares no nearer come,
But waves me towards his northern home.
Happiness
© Wilfred Owen
Yet heaven looks smaller than the old doll's-home,
No nestling place is left in bluebell bloom,
And the wide arms of trees have lost their scope.
The former happiness is unreturning:
Boys' griefs are not so grievous as our yearning,
Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.
Thick Is The Darkness
© William Ernest Henley
Thick is the darkness -
Sunward, O, sunward!
Rough is the highway -
Onward, still onward!
The Adventures of a Turtle
© Russell Edson
The turtle carries his house on his back. He is both the house and the person of that house.
But actually, under the shell is a little room where the true turtle, wearing long underwear, sits at a little table. At one end of the room a series of levers sticks out of slots in the floor, like the controls of a steam shovel. It is with these that the turtle controls the legs of his house.
Most of the time the turtle sits under the sloping ceiling of his turtle room reading catalogues at the little table where a candle burns. He leans on one elbow, and then the other. He crosses one leg, and then the other. Finally he yawns and buries his head in his arms and sleeps.
If he feels a child picking up his house he quickly douses the candle and runs to the control levers and activates the legs of his house and tries to escape.
The Tall Figures of Giacometti
© May Swenson
We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.
English Eclogues VI - The Ruined Cottage
© Robert Southey
I pass this ruin'd dwelling oftentimes
And think of other days. It wakes in me
A transient sadness, but the feelings Charles
That ever with these recollections rise,
I trust in God they will not pass away.
