War poems
/ page 424 of 504 /
Mister William
© William Schwenck Gilbert
OH, listen to the tale of MISTER WILLIAM, if you please,
Whom naughty, naughty judges sent away beyond the seas.
He forged a party's will, which caused anxiety and strife,
Resulting in his getting penal servitude for life.
De Libris
© William Cosmo Monkhouse
True there are books and books. Theres Gray,
For instance, and theres Bacon;
Theres Longfellow, and Monstrelet,
And also Coltons Lacon,
With Laws of Whist and those of Libel,
And Euclid, and the Mormon Bible.
The Man Bitten By Fleas
© Anne Kingsmill Finch
A Peevish Fellow laid his Head
On Pillows, stuff'd with Down;
But was no sooner warm in Bed,
With hopes to rest his Crown,
The Homeless Ghost
© George MacDonald
Still flowed the music, flowed the wine.
The youth in silence went;
Through naked streets, in cold moonshine,
His homeward way he bent,
Where, on the city's seaward line,
His lattice seaward leant.
A Translation Of The CIV. Psalm To The Original Sense
© Sir Henry Wotton
My soul exalt the Lord with Hymns of praise:
O Lord my God, how boundless is thy might?
Whose Throne of State is cloath'd with glorious rays,
And round about hast rob'd thy self with light.
Who like a curtain hast the Heavens display'd,
And in the watry Roofs thy Chambers laid.
The Otter
© Seamus Justin Heaney
When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.
Elegy
© Allen Tate
No more the white refulgent streets.
Never the dry hollows of the mind
Shall he in fine courtesy walk
Again, for death is not unkind.
To O.E.A.
© Claude McKay
Your voice is the color of a robin's breast,
And there's a sweet sob in it like rain-still rain in the night.
Casualty
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
General John
© William Schwenck Gilbert
The bravest names for fire and flames
And all that mortal durst,
Were GENERAL JOHN and PRIVATE JAMES,
Of the Sixty-seventy-first.
Act of Union
© Seamus Justin Heaney
ITo-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Death Of A Naturalist
© Seamus Justin Heaney
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Grandmothers Teaching
© Alfred Austin
``Grandmother dear, you do not know; you have lived the old-world life,
Under the twittering eaves of home, sheltered from storm and strife;
Rocking cradles, and covering jams, knitting socks for baby feet,
Or piecing together lavender bags for keeping the linen sweet:
Daughter, wife, and mother in turn, and each with a blameless breast,
Then saying your prayers when the nightfall came, and quietly dropping to rest.
Your noble reign
© Ivan Donn Carswell
The man whose term we would remember as our longest,
constant serving Head of State, besides the late Sir Robert
Gordon Menzies, turned 67 yesterday. Congratulations John,
youve run a long and torrid race, kept up a frenzied pace
Worthy Places
© Ivan Donn Carswell
There were some worthy places where we could escape,
avoid the heavy weight of living in a densely
peopled space; the first was to the outside loo
(the only loo but where at least the toilet paper
When We Were Young
© Ivan Donn Carswell
As a child I played in the same frosty fields
barefoot as my no lesser loved classmates,
whom we challenged to show courage in the numbing cold,
then together we held our chilled fingers over the roaring stove
that warmed our prefabricated, asbestos-sided classroom.
What does it take?
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Is the current rate of global warming
a serious and cogent warning?
Do we need to think about the fact
that higher tides will drown Pacific island states
