Time poems
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Stella's Birthday March 13, 1727
© Jonathan Swift
Although we now can form no more
Long schemes of life, as heretofore;
Yet you, while time is running fast,
Can look with joy on what is past.
Since the Cities are the Cities
© Henry Lawson
FOOLS can parrot-cry the prophet when the proof is close at hand,
And the blind can see the danger when the foe is in the land!
Truth was never cynicism, death or ruins not a joke,
Told-you-so is not a warningPatriotism not a croak.
Late Echo
© John Ashbery
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.
A Vagabond Song
© Bliss William Carman
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
Low Barometer
© John Hall Wheelock
The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.
Sonnet On An Old Book With Uncut Leaves
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
How different was the thought of him that writ.
What promised he to love of ease and wealth,
When men should read and kindle at his wit.
But here decay eats up the book by stealth,
While it, like some old maiden, solemnly,
Hugs its incongruous virginity!
Eheu Fugaces -- !
© William Schwenck Gilbert
The air is charged with amatory numbers -
Soft madrigals, and dreamy lovers' lays.
Peace, peace, old heart! Why waken from its slumbers
The aching memory of the old, old days?
The Fight in the Meadow
© Russell Edson
The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric...
Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke...
The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull.
As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth.
For love I, too, could die (she said) nor fear it,
© Robert Crawford
Such love as some of the dead queens have had
Whose sorrow matched their beauty. I could bear it,
And I think die too, to have been so glad.
With the sweet wonder in a great light lying
Charon’s Cosmology
© Charles Simic
With only his dim lantern
To tell him where he is
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up
The Princess (part 4)
© Alfred Tennyson
But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and entered in,
There leaning deep in broidered down we sank
Our elbows: on a tripod in the midst
A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.
Of the Last Verses in the Book
© Edmund Waller
When we for age could neither read nor write,
The subject made us able to indite.
The soul, with nobler resolutions deckt,
The body stooping, does herself erect:
No mortal parts are requisite to raise
Her, that unbodied can her Maker praise.
The Veteran
© William Henry Ogilvie
He asks no favour from the Field, no forward place demands
Save what he claims by fearless heart and light and dainty hands;
No man need make a way for him at ditch or gap or gate,
He rides on level terms with all, if not at equal weight
The Horse Fell Off the Poem
© Mahmoud Darwish
The horse fell off the poem
and the Galilean women were wet
with butterflies and dew,
dancing above chrysanthemum
The Suicide
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
Last was the wealth I carried in life's pack-
Youth, health, ambition, hope and trust but Time
Life Cycle of Common Man
© Howard Nemerov
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
Isle Of Wight--Spring, 1891
© Horace Smith
I know not what the cause may be,
Or whether there be one or many;
But this year's Spring has seemed to me
More exquisite than any.
