Travel poems
/ page 61 of 119 /
Humanitad
© Oscar Wilde
It is full winter now: the trees are bare,
Save where the cattle huddle from the cold
Beneath the pine, for it doth never wear
The autumn's gaudy livery whose gold
Her jealous brother pilfers, but is true
To the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew
Ravenna
© Oscar Wilde
(Newdigate prize poem recited in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford
June
26th, 1878.
Child of Europe
© Czeslaw Milosz
1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.
Fit the Second ( Hunting of the Snark )
© Lewis Carroll
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!
Sweetness
© Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
The Errancy
© Jorie Graham
Then the cicadas again like kindling that won’t take.
The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember
Eve of St. Agony or The Middleclass Was Sitting on Its Fat
© Kenneth Patchen
Ghosts in packs like dogs grinning at ghosts
Pocketless thieves in a city that never sleeps
Chains clank, warders curse, this world is stark mad
Ulysses
© Alfred Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
reading
© Joanne Burns
there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.
if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read
from The Seasons: Winter
© James Thomson
Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good! teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Near Helikon
© Trumbull Stickney
By such an all-embalming summer day
As sweetens now among the mountain pines
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
Late March
© Edward Hirsch
Saturday morning in late March.
I was alone and took a long walk,
though I also carried a book
of the Alone, which companioned me.
Beyond Hammonton
© Stephen Dunn
The back roads I’ve traveled late
at night, alone, a little drunk,
wishing I were someone
on whom nothing is lost,
a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore
© Charles Bukowski
but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,
and all thanks to an ugly horse
who wrote this poem.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The Waste Carpet
© William Matthews
O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.
