Time poems
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I Knew A Woman
© Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
A Moment Of Happiness
© Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
My Papa's Waltz
© Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
A Pig's-Eye View Of Literature
© Dorothy Parker
The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Byron and Shelley and Keats
From The Last Island: To Lady Elisabeth Verreet
© Regina Derieva
Oval mirror of the sea,
age-warped isle waved and cloudy,
each angle crystalline and salty.
my lens into reality.
The Chronicle Of The Drum
© William Makepeace Thackeray
"'Though Europe against me was arm'd,
Your chiefs and my people are true;
I still might have struggled with fortune,
And baffled all Europe with you.
I Don't Feel At Home Where I Am
© Regina Derieva
I don't feel at home where I am,
or where I spend time; only where,
beyond counting, there's freedom and calm,
that is, waves, that is, space where, when there,
To Lucasta, Going Beyond The Seas
© Richard Lovelace
If to be absent were to be
Away from thee;
Or that when I am gone,
You or I were alone,
Then, my Lucasta, might I crave
Pity from blust'ring wind or swallowing wave.
The Grasshopper
© Richard Lovelace
O thou that swing'st upon the waving ear
Of some well-filled oaten beard,
Drunk ev'ry night with a delicious tear
Dropped thee from heav'n, where now th' art reared,
Beggars And Kings
© William Stanley Merwin
In the evening
all the hours that weren't used
are emptied out
and the beggars are waiting to gather them up
Vehicles
© William Stanley Merwin
This is a place on the way after the distances
can no longer be kept straight here in this dark corner
of the barn a mound of wheels has convened along
raveling courses to stop in a single moment
The Source
© William Stanley Merwin
There in the fringe of trees between
the upper field and the edge of the one
below it that runs above the valley
one time I heard in the early
Green Fields
© William Stanley Merwin
By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
The Speed Of Light
© William Stanley Merwin
So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
Any Time
© William Stanley Merwin
How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
When You Go Away
© William Stanley Merwin
When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years
Yesterday
© William Stanley Merwin
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
Modern Love XXXVII: Along the Garden Terrace
© George Meredith
Along the garden terrace, under which
A purple valley (lighted at its edge
By smoky torch-flame on the long cloud-ledge
Whereunder dropped the chariot), glimmers rich,
Modern Love XXXVI: My Lady unto Madam
© George Meredith
My Lady unto Madam makes her bow.
The charm of women is, that even while
You're probed by them for tears, you yet may smile,
Nay, laugh outright, as I have done just now.
Disabled
© Wilfred Owen
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
