War poems
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Sonnet 52: "So am I as the rich whose blessed key..."
© William Shakespeare
So am I as the rich whose blessed key,
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
Chamber Thicket
© Sharon Olds
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
To The Rev. William Cawthorne Unwin
© William Cowper
Unwin, I should but ill repay
The kindness of a friend,
Whose worth deserves as warm a lay
As ever friendship penned,
Thy name omitted in a page
That would reclaim a vicious age.
On the Metro
© C. K. Williams
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
Quiet Dead!
© George MacDonald
Quiet, quiet dead,
Have ye aught to say
From your hidden bed
In the earthy clay?
Morte d'Arthur
© Alfred Tennyson
To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:
"It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,
Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm.
A little thing may harm a wounded man.
Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,
Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word."
The Ghost
© Richard Harris Barham
There stands a City,- neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty;
The Gardener 38
© Anselm Hollo
My love, once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind.
A Wolf Is at the Laundromat
© Jack Prelutsky
A wolf is at the Laundromat,
it's not a wary stare-wolf,
it's short and fat, it tips its hat,
unlike a scary glare-wolf.
The Black Destrier. A Ballad Of The Third Crusade
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
FIRST 'mid the lion Richard's host,
Sir Aymer fought in Holy Land;
And they loved him well for his honest heart,
And they feared, for his stalwart hand.
The Miller's Daughter
© Alfred Tennyson
It is the millers daughter,
And she is grown so dear, so dear,
That I would be the jewel
That trembles at her ear:
For hid in ringlets day and night,
Id touch her neck so warm and white.
Caliban upon Setebos
© Robert Browning
'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
The Birth Place of Pleasure
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
At the creation of the Earth
Pleasure, that divinest birth,
From the soil of Heaven did rise,
Wrapped in sweet wild melodies--
brothers
© Paul Celan
(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)
1
invitation
A Song: Ask me no more where Jove bestows
© Thomas Carew
Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
Sunday: New Guinea
© Ishmael Reed
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,
The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,
From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,
Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him.
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?
