Truth poems

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The best days of my life

© Ivan Donn Carswell

What is it about Bryan Adams and his song
Summer of 69? Why do the lyrics linger? Was it
90° in the shade and the harbinger of the end
of the golden weather, or the impending closure

I asked my fellow listeners what they thought
about his claims that malfeasance was soured
within this state by parliamentary representatives
but not, of course, those members seated where
he sat in opposition. His disposition was to blame
the government as if he wasnt part of it.

Desires that you can only tame to know

© Ivan Donn Carswell

"Zipless sex" one cynic called
this festival of fornication,
this celebration of new-found sexual strength
and urbane honesty, of sex for sex as sex alone

Woodstock Park

© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Here in a little rustic hermitage

Alfred the Saxon King, Alfred the Great,

On The Death of a Father

© Ivan Donn Carswell

This dismal place I hide my grief is crowded shame,
my father would have taught me tame my trembling lips
without contempt, face far constraints tight-lipped,
remain serene; I dream how well I played his silent game.

An Ode

© Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I

NOT with slow, funereal sound

Compensations

© Alfred Noyes

Not with a flash that rends the blue
Shall fall the avenging sword.
Gently as the evening dew
Descends the mighty Lord.

Jessie of Gibraltar

© Ivan Donn Carswell

Our lives were founded on this rock, this Jessie of Gibraltar
Whose unfailing love endured beyond her ample nursing,
And we grew out of a rich and favoured childhood aware
Her powers were real (we tested them enough to know their soundness) into

Ill have to change my mind

© Ivan Donn Carswell

Ill have to change my mind on war, I need to take a break
from structured thought; theres more to peace - it dictates
a longer oar to keep the calm than takes to make a little war.
Our history as a people is a theatre of strife and where

Piano by Patrick Phillips: American Life in Poetry #173 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006

© Ted Kooser

Poets are especially good at investing objects with meaning, or in drawing meaning from the things of this world. Here Patrick Phillips of Brooklyn, New York, does a masterful job of comparing a wrecked piano to his feelings. Piano

Touched by your goodness, I am like
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.

Bluebeard: Sonnet VI

© Edna St. Vincent Millay

This door you might not open, and you did;

So enter now, and see for what slight thing

The Nativity

Upon my meanness, poverty, and guilt,
The trophy of thy glory shall be built;
My selfdisdain shall be the unshaken base,
And my deformity its fairest grace;
For destitute of good, and rich in ill,
Must be my state and my description still.

Stoves and sunshine

© Eugene Field

Prate, ye who will, of so-called charms you find across the sea-
The land of stoves and sunshine is good enough for me!
I've done the grand for fourteen months in every foreign clime,
And I've learned a heap of learning, but I've shivered all the time;
And the biggest bit of wisdom I've acquired-as I can see-
Is that which teaches that this land's the land of lands for me.

Futurelessness

Time to count the torrid cost of careless words inflicted on
your battered dignity, time to close the ugly face that chanted
out invective foul and shattered amity, time to quell
the fervid rush of feckless wrath which weighs
against the bloodied loss this manic madness brusque
and hot has flung across the face of sanity.

Every Time I laugh Aloud (An Ode to Short People)

Every time I laugh aloud, who springs to mind but Johnnie Howard?
Cathartic laughter eases stress which Johnnie causes in excess,
so when I hum acerbic lines of Randy Newmans quirky song
dont want no short people round here,

Burns

MY OWN WILD BURNS! these rude-wrought rhymes of thine
In golden worth are like the unshapely coin
Of some new realm, yet pure as from the mine
And Art may well be spared with such alloy
As dims the bullion to improve the die!