Time poems
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The Twelve
© Alexander Blok
III
Our sons have gone
to serve the Reds
to serve the Reds
to risk their heads!
The Stranger
© Alexander Blok
And every evening beyond the barriers
Gentlemen of practiced wit and charm
Go strolling beside the drainage ditches --
A tilted derby and a lady at the arm.
The Death of Grandfather
© Alexander Blok
We waited commonly for sleep or even death.
The instances were wearisome as ages.
But suddenly the wind's refreshing breath
Touched through the window the Holy Bible's pages:
Town Owl
© Laurie Lee
On eves of cold, when slow coal fires,
rooted in basements, burn and branch,
brushing with smoke the city air;
When quartered moons pale in the sky,
The World
© Henry Vaughan
1 I saw Eternity the other night,
2 Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
3 All calm, as it was bright;
4 And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
The Water-Fall
© Henry Vaughan
1 With what deep murmurs through time's silent stealth
2 Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat'ry wealth
3 Here flowing fall,
4 And chide, and call,
The Evening-Watch: A Dialogue
© Henry Vaughan
3 Go, sleep in peace; and when thou liest
4 Unnumber'd in thy dust, when all this frame
5 Is but one dram, and what thou now descriest
6 In sev'ral parts shall want a name,
7 Then may his peace be with thee, and each dust
8 Writ in his book, who ne'er betray'd man's trust!
Son-Days
© Henry Vaughan
1 Bright shadows of true Rest! some shoots of bliss,
Heaven once a week;
The next world's gladness prepossest in this;
A day to seek;
Etesia Absent
© Henry Vaughan
Love, the world's life! What a sad death
Thy absence is to lose our breath
At once and die, is but to live
Enlarged, without the scant reprieve
Jerome
© Randall Jarrell
Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon.
Der heilige Hieronymus--his lion is at the zoo--
Listens, listens. All the long, soft, summer day
Dreams affright his couch, the deep boils like a pot.
As the sun sets, the last patient rises,
Says to him, Father, trembles, turns away.
The Old And The New Masters
© Randall Jarrell
About suffering, about adoration, the old masters
Disagree. When someone suffers, no one else eats
Or walks or opens the window--no one breathes
As the sufferers watch the sufferer.
The House In The Woods
© Randall Jarrell
At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the woodMakes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to goodOr evil: to the cage, to the oven, to the House
In the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the storyWe make of life. But after the last leaf,
The Elementary Scene
© Randall Jarrell
Looking back in my mind I can see
The white sun like a tin plate
Over the wooden turning of the weeds;
The street jerking --a wet swing--
Children Selecting Books In A Library
© Randall Jarrell
With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
Hope
© Randall Jarrell
The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.
The week is dealt out like a hand
That children pick up card by card.
One keeps getting the same hand.
In Memory of Jane Fraser
© Geoffrey Hill
When snow like sheep lay in the fold
And wind went begging at each door,
And the far hills were blue with cold,
And a cloud shroud lay on the moor,
September Song
© Geoffrey Hill
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
From On Being Fired Again
© Erin Belieu
most notably by Larry who found my snood
unsuitable, another time by Jack,
whom I was sleeping with. Poor attitude,
tardiness, a contagious lack
of team spirit; I have been unmotivated
For Catherine: Juana, Infanta of Navarre
© Erin Belieu
Once you were a daughter, too,
then a wife and now the mother
of a baby with a Spanish name.
