War poems
/ page 270 of 504 /
Passing Through
© Ai
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
Constantinople
© Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Greiv'd at a view which strikes vpon my Mind
The short liv'd Vanity of Human kind
In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight,
And turn where Eastern Pomp gives gay delight.
Father and Son
© Delmore Schwartz
FRANZ KAFKA
Father:
On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——
Kin
© Jon Anderson
You left me to force strangers
Into brother molds, exacting
Taxations they never
Owed or could ever pay.
Manifest
© Reginald Shepherd
Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body
master snapping masts in half, absent
winds’ workmanship: what window
will I look you through, what brook, stream
Lincoln, Man of the People
© Edwin Markham
When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,
You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease
© Alfred Tennyson
You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.
Étude Réaliste
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
(excerpt)
I
A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink,
Might tempt, should heaven see meet,
An angel's lips to kiss, we think,
A baby's feet.
Movement Song
© Elizabeth Daryush
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
Song of the Open Road
© Walt Whitman
1
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
from Totem Poem [Abandoned in a field near Yass]
© Luke Davies
Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm
and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness,
The Men
© Pablo Neruda
The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks,
these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters,
this cloddish insecurity of my poor families,
is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door?
To Robert Browning
© Heather Fuller
There is delight in singing, tho’ none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
Holy Sonnets: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
© John Donne
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
