Poems begining by W
/ page 59 of 113 /
Wait
© C. K. Williams
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
Writing in the Afterlife
© Billy Collins
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.
What shall I do with this body they gave me
© Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
What shall I do with this body they gave me,
so much my own, so intimate with me?
Wasps
© Ho Xuan Huong
Where are you wandering to, little fools
Come, big sister will teach you how to write verse
Itchy little wasps sucking rotting flowers
Horny baby lambkins butting gaps in the fence
When Nightingales Their Lulling Song
© Bernard de Ventadorn
I know not when we meet again,
For grief hath rent my heart in twain:
For thee the royal court I fled,--
But guard me from the ills I dread,
And quick I'll join the bright array
Of courteous knights and ladies gay.
Wet Evening in April
© Patrick Kavanagh
The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.
Who Said It Was Simple
© Elizabeth Daryush
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.
Wavelength
© David St. John
They were sitting on the thin mattress
He’d once rolled & carried up the four floors
To his room only to find it covered nearly all
Of the bare wood
Leaving just a small path alongside the wall
Walking on Tiptoe
© Ted Kooser
Long ago we quit lifting our heels
like the others—horse, dog, and tiger—
Woak Wer Good Enough Woonce
© William Barnes
Ees: now mahogany's the goo,
An' good wold English woak won't do.
Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket
© Roald Dahl
I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My lifes unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.
Written For My Son, And Spoken By Him, At A public Examination For Victors.
© Mary Barber
Boys of a brutal, cruel Disposition,
Should go to Spain, to serve the Inquisition.
O what a Change in Landlords would appear!
Next Age, not one would rack his Tenants here.
West Of Fanny O'Dea's
© Alice Guerin Crist
Youll not find the name in geography books,
It isnt marked on the map,
Nor mentioned in atlas or history,
Yet youve heard of the place mayhap.
Wirastrua
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
Wirastrua, wirastrua, woe to me that you are dead!
The corpse has spoken from out his bed.
When I Am Only I
© Robert Laurence Binyon
When I am only I,
The secret battle--ground
Of world and will, wherein
Self is so strictly bound,
When Lydia Smiles
© Madison Julius Cawein
Ah, me! what were this world to me
Without her smile!--What poetry,
What glad hesperian paths I find
Of love, that lead my soul and mind
To happy hills of Arcady,
When Lydia smiles!
Why Sit'st Thou By That Ruin'd Hall?
© Sir Walter Scott
"Why sit'st thou by that ruin'd hall,
Thou aged carle so stern and grey?
Dost thou its former pride recall,
Or ponder how it pass'd away?"-
With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath
© Michael Rosen
In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied
Walking
© Thomas Traherne
To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.
