Time poems
/ page 452 of 792 /
From “Odi Barbare”
© Geoffrey Hill
xxiv
What is far hence led to the den of making:
Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy
Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Digging the Georgics
All The Little Hoofprints
© Robinson Jeffers
Farther up the gorge the sea's voice fainted and ceased.
We heard a new noise far away ahead of us, vague and metallic,
Sing a While Longer
© Edwin Markham
Has the bright sun set,
Has the gale grown stronger?
Still we’ll not grieve yet:
We will sing a while longer!
Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
It's two in the mornin' on Saturday night
At Rosalie's Good Eats Café.
To Penshurst
© Benjamin Jonson
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Convict Once - Part First.
© James Brunton Stephens
I.
FREE again! Free again! eastward and westward, before me, behind me,
Wide lies Australia! and free are my feet, as my soul is, to roam!
Oh joy unwonted of space undetermined! No limit assigned me!
Freedom conditioned by nought save the need and desire of a home!
To Mr Fashionable Fiancee
© Peter McArthur
I SOMETIMES think it would be sweet
If we were like the olden lovers
The simple-hearted ones we meet
In musty books with vellum covers.
Hymn to the Comb-Over
© Wesley McNair
How the thickest of them erupt just
above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff
The bright blessed day with joy we see
© Nicolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig
The bright blessed day with joy we see
Rise out of the sea at dawning;
It lightens the sky unceasingly,
Our gain and delight adorning!
As children of light we sense that soon
Dark night will give way to morning!
To The Reader
© John Bunyan
The title page will show, if there thou look,
Who are the proper subjects of this book.
They're boys and girls of all sorts and degrees,
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Memory As a Hearing Aid
© Tony Hoagland
Somewhere, someone is asking a question,
and I stand squinting at the classroom
with one hand cupped behind my ear,
trying to figure out where that voice is coming from.
Modern Love: XXXIV
© George Meredith
Madam would speak with me. So, now it comes:
The Deluge or else Fire! She's well, she thanks
Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson
© Gertrude Stein
I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them.
From The Wreck
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
"Turn out, boys!" - "What's up with our super. to-night?
The man's mad - Two hours to daybreak I'd swear -
Stark mad - why, there isn't a glimmer of light."
"Take Bolingbroke, Alec, give Jack the young mare;
Ghazal
© Agha Shahid Ali
Feel the patient’s heart
Pounding—oh please, this once—
—JAMES MERRILL
I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.
A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.
Asses
© Padraic Colum
"I KNOW where I'd get
An ass that would do,
If I had the money
A pound or two."
(Amidst the rush and roar of life...)
© Anselm Hollo
Amidst the rush and roar of life, O beauty, carved in stone, you stand mute and still, alone and aloof.
Great Time sits enamoured at your feet and repeats to you:
Speak, speak to me, my love; speak, my mute bride!
But your speech is shut up in stone, O you immovably fair!
Grant
© Henry Cuyler Bunner
Smile on, thou new-come Springif on thy breeze
The breath of a great man go wavering up
And out of this world's knowledge, it is well.
