Time poems
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Ballade Of A Toyokuni Colour-Print
© William Ernest Henley
Dear, 'twas a dozen lives ago;
But that I was a lucky man
The Toyokuni here will show:
I loved you--once--in old Japan.
Paying The Captain
© Russell Edson
But it seems there will be no journey since we have
gotten the captain used to a good thing. And so we
must spend the rest of our days throwing the captain
overboard.
The Phantom Bells
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Upveiled in yonder dim ethereal sea,
Its airy towers the work of phantom spells,
"Philip My King."
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Banned from earth's day--thine inward sight expands
Above the night-bound senses' birth or bars;
Lord of a larger realm, of subtler scope,
Where thou at last shalt press the lips of Hope,
And feel God's angel lift in radiant hands
Thy life from darkness to a place of stars!
The Columbiad: Book X
© Joel Barlow
From that mark'd stage of man we now behold,
More rapid strides his coming paths unfold;
His continents are traced, his islands found,
His well-taught sails on all his billows bound,
His varying wants their new discoveries ply,
And seek in earth's whole range their sure supply.
Hands
© Russell Edson
Smokes quietly in the evening by the four legged
table wagging its (well why not) tail, friendly
chap.
The Family Monkey
© Russell Edson
We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather
recklessly with funds carefully gathered since
grandfather's time for the purchase of a steam monkey.
Inscription In A Garden
© George Gascoigne
IF any flower that here is grown
Or any herb may ease your pain,
Take and account it as your own,
But recompense the like again;
For some and some is honest play,
And so my wife taught me to say.
The Ruins Of Time
© Robert Lowell
(Quevedo, Mire los muros de la partia mia and
Buscas en Roma a Roma, (!)O peregrino!)II saw the musty shingles of my house,
raw wood and fixed once, now a wash of moss
eroded by the ruin of age
Waking in the Blue
© Robert Lowell
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
The Withdrawal
© Robert Lowell
This week the house went on the market
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and joins another room.
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
© Robert Lowell
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
The Leader and the Bad Girl
© Henry Lawson
BECAUSE HE had sinned and suffered, because he loved the land,
And because of his wonderful sympathy, he held mens hearts in his hand.
Born and bred of the people, he knew their every whim,
And because he had struggled through poverty he could draw the poor to him:
Speaker and leader and poet, tall and handsome and strong,
With the eyes of a dog for faith and truth that blazed at the thought of a wrong.
Man And Wife
© Robert Lowell
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade--
loving, rapid, merciless--
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
Water
© Robert Lowell
It was a Maine lobster town
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,
The Prophecy Of St. Oran: Part I
© Mathilde Blind
"Earth, earth on the mouth of Oran, that he may blab no more." Gaelic Proverb.
The Harps of Heaven
© Sydney Thompson Dobell
On a solemn day
I clomb the shining bulwark of the skies:
Polarity
© Claude McKay
Nay, why reproach each other, be unkind,
For there's no plane on which we two may meet?
Let's both forgive, forget, for both were blind,
And life is of a day, and time is fleet.
Outcast
© Claude McKay
For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
