Time poems
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Nights Nothings Again
© Carl Sandburg
WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?
Long Guns
© Carl Sandburg
THEN came, Oscar, the time of the guns.
And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,
Unless guns sprang up
And spoke their language.
Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind
© Carl Sandburg
The past is a bucket of ashes. 1THE WOMAN named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
Death Snips Proud Men
© Carl Sandburg
DEATH is stronger than all the governments because the governments are men and men die and then death laughs: Now you see em, now you dont.
Death is stronger than all proud men and so death snips proud men on the nose, throws a pair of dice and says: Read em and weep.
Who am I?
© Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
The Mist
© Carl Sandburg
I AM the mist, the impalpable mist,
Back of the thing you seek.
My arms are long,
Long as the reach of time and space.
Humdrum
© Carl Sandburg
IF I had a million lives to live
and a million deaths to die
in a million humdrum worlds,
Id like to change my name
Skyscraper
© Carl Sandburg
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.
The Junk Man
© Carl Sandburg
I AM glad God saw Death
And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired
of living:
A Mysterious Naked Man
© Alden Nowlan
A mysterious naked man has been reported
on Cranston Avenue. The police are performing
the usual ceremonies with coloured lights and sirens.
Almost everyone is outdoors and strangers are conversing
An Autumn Sunset
© Edith Wharton
ILeaguered in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets,
The Other Tiger
© Jorge Luis Borges
A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
Browning Decides To Be A Poet
© Jorge Luis Borges
in these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
To A Cat
© Jorge Luis Borges
Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
History Of The Night
© Jorge Luis Borges
Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
Limits
© Jorge Luis Borges
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
The Art Of Poetry
© Jorge Luis Borges
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
We are the time. We are the famous
© Jorge Luis Borges
We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.
The Cyclists
© Amy Lowell
Spread on the roadway,
With open-blown jackets,
Like black, soaring pinions,
They swoop down the hillside,
After Hearing a Waltz by Bartok
© Amy Lowell
But why did I kill him? Why? Why?
In the small, gilded room, near the stair?
My ears rack and throb with his cry,
And his eyes goggle under his hair,
