Time poems
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The Arrival
© Patricia Goedicke
Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling
As always, just when you’d given up hope
Nimbly he backs out of the taxi
The Young
© Roddy Lumsden
You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly
makes you laugh like mules. Chances
dance off your wrists, each day ready,
The Damned
© Roddy Lumsden
Kitten curious, or roaring down drinks
in Soho sumps, small hours tour buses,
satellite station green rooms, or conked
Finding the Space in the Heart
© Gary Snyder
I first saw it in the sixties,
driving a Volkswagen camper
To Mrs. Leonard on The Death of Her Husband
© Phillis Wheatley
GRIM Monarch! see depriv'd of vital breath,
A young Physician in the dust of death!
The Cane-Bottom’d Chair
© William Makepeace Thackeray
In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I’ve a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.
Deserted
© Madison Julius Cawein
A broken rainbow on the skies of May
Touching the sodden roses and low clouds,
White Water
© Eamon Grennan
Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be
indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata
for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock
shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes
and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all
is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.
The Deserted Village
© Mark van Doren
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain,
The Knight's Epitaph
© William Cullen Bryant
This is the church which Pisa, great and free,
Reared to St. Catharine. How the time-stained walls,
Sugar
© Gertrude Stein
A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.
Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.
A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.
A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.
The Scholar-Gipsy
© Matthew Arnold
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!
To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband
© Phillis Wheatley
To join for ever on the hills of light:
To thine embrace this joyful spirit moves
To thee, the partner of his earthly loves;
He welcomes thee to pleasures more refin'd,
And better suited to th' immortal mind.
Walking Parker Home
© Bob Kaufman
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/
The House Of Dust: Part 02: 07:
© Conrad Aiken
'One white rose . . . or is it pink, to-day?'
They pause and smile, not caring what they say,
If only they may talk.
The crowd flows past them like dividing waters.
Dreaming they stand, dreaming they walk.
Oh, If That Rainbow Up There
© Ethel Turner
Oh, if that rainbow up there,
Spanning the sky past the hill,
A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails
© Nikki Giovanni
Why, LBJ has made it
quite clear to me
He doesn’t give a
Good goddamn what I think
(else why would he continue to masterbate in public?)
