Time poems
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The Heart Of Joy
© Edith Nesbit
Wide is the world, and so many would sigh for you,
Long for and cry for you,
Weep for and die for you,
You being you.
I Close My Eyes
© David Ignatow
I close my eyes like a good little boy at night in bed,
as I was told to do by my mother when she lived,
and before bed I brush my teeth and slip on my pajamas,
as I was told, and look forward to tomorrow.
I Dreamed That I Was Old
© Stanley Kunitz
I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.
Time Without End
© Arthur Rimbaud
We have found it again.
What? Time without end.
'Tis the ocean gone
For a walk with the sun.
To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
© William Butler Yeats
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
The Sun-Dial
© Henry Austin Dobson
'Tis an old dial, dark with many a stain;
In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom,
Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain,
And white in winter like a marble tomb.
The Idols
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I.2
The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.
The One Certainty
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,
All things are vanity. The eye and ear
The Wind of The World
© George MacDonald
Chained is the Spring. The Night-wind bold
Blows over the hard earth;
Time is not more confused and cold,
Nor keeps more wintry mirth.
Lohengrin
© Emma Lazarus
THE holy bell, untouched by human hands,
Clanged suddenly, and tolled with solemn knell.
Between the massive, blazoned temple-doors,
Thrown wide, to let the summer morning in,
To Help the Monkey Cross the River
© Thomas Lux
which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 72
© Alfred Tennyson
Who might'st have heaved a windless flame
Up the deep East, or, whispering, play'd
A chequer-work of beam and shade
Along the hills, yet look'd the same.
The Seventh Inning
© Donald Hall
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole
occupation of the aging boy.
Amusing Our Daughters
© John Betjeman
after Po Chü-i,
for Robert Creeley
We don’t lack people here on the Northern coast,
But they are people one meets, not people one cares for.
So I bundle my daughters into the car
And with my brother poets, go to visit you, brother.
Ancapagari
© Carolyn Forche
In the morning of the tribe this name Ancapagari was given to these mountains. The name, then alive, spread into the world and never returned. Ancapagari: no foot-step ever spoken, no mule deer killed from its foothold, left for dead. Ancapagari opened the stones. Pine roots gripped peak rock with their claws. Water dug into the earth and vanished, boiling up again in another place. The water was bitten by aspen, generations of aspen shot their light colored trunks into space. Ancapagari. At that time, if the whisper was in your mouth, you were lighted.
Now these people are buried. The root-taking, finished. Buried in everything, thousands taken root. The roots swell, nesting. Openings widen for the roots to surface.
They sway within you in steady wind of your breath. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it.
Ancapagari has circled, returned to these highlands. The yellow pines deathless, the sparrow hawks scull, the waters are going numb. Ancapagari longs to be spoken in each tongue. It is the name of the god who has come from among us.
Eros
© John Hall Wheelock
Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,
But shameless will and power immense,
In secret sensuous innocence.
