Truth poems
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Sex Without Love
© Sharon Olds
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
The Supreme Sacrifice
© Emma Lazarus
Well-nigh two thousand years hath Israel
Suffered the scorn of man for love of God;
Endured the outlaw's ban, the yoke, the rod,
With perfect patience. Empires rose and fell,
The Art Of Drowning
© Billy Collins
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
Hymn To Adversity
© Thomas Gray
Daughter of Jove, relentless Power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour
The Bad affright, afflict the Best!
The Cook's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Jack of Dover: an article of cookery. (Transcriber's note:
suggested by some commentators to be a kind of pie, and by
others to be a fish)
The Man of Law's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Plight: pulled; the word is an obsolete past tense from
"pluck."
The Reeve's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. "With blearing of a proude miller's eye": dimming his eye;
playing off a joke on him.
The Miller's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
1. Pilate, an unpopular personage in the mystery-plays of the
middle ages, was probably represented as having a gruff, harsh
voice.
The Wife of Bath's Tale
© Geoffrey Chaucer
7. "But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and
silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and
some to dishonour." -- 2 Tim. ii 20.
The General Prologue
© Geoffrey Chaucer
There was also a Reeve, and a Millere,
A Sompnour, and a Pardoner also,
A Manciple, and myself, there were no mo'.
Lao-tse Prepares A Verdict
© Luis Benitez
Nothing of what I say
may deviate the fall of a leaf.
A word will not
detain the other one.
A Hymn for Christmas Day
© Thomas Chatterton
How shall we celebrate the day,
When God appeared in mortal clay,
The mark of worldly scorn;
When the Archangel's heavenly Lays,
Attempted the Redeemer's Praise
And hail'd Salvation's Morn!
Frederick Douglass
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
A hush is over all the teeming lists,
And there is pause, a breath-space in the strife;
A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists
And vapors that obscure the sun of life.
And Ethiopia, with bosom torn,
Laments the passing of her noblest born.
Life's Tragedy
© Paul Laurence Dunbar
It may be misery not to sing at all,
And to go silent through the brimming day;
It may be misery never to be loved,
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.
Carol of Words.
© Walt Whitman
1
EARTH, round, rolling, compactsuns, moons, animalsall these are words to be
said;
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advancesbeings, premonitions, lispings of the future,
Great are the Myths.
© Walt Whitman
1
GREAT are the mythsI too delight in them;
Great are Adam and EveI too look back and accept them;
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages, inventors, rulers,
Passage to India.
© Walt Whitman
1
SINGING my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
All is Truth.
© Walt Whitman
O ME, man of slack faith so long!
Standing aloofdenying portions so long;
Only aware to-day of compact, all-diffused truth;
Discovering to-day there is no lie, or form of lie, and can be none, but grows as
Walt Whitman.
© Walt Whitman
1
I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
