Wish poems
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Unclean
© Brooks Haxton
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am
like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am
as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.
Psalm 102
A Certain Man
© Jean Toomer
A certain man wishes to be a prince
Of this earth; he also wants to be
A saint and master of the being-world.
Conscience cannot exist in the first:
Phantasmagoria CANTO IV ( Hys Nouryture )
© Lewis Carroll
"OH, when I was a little Ghost,
A merry time had we!
Each seated on his favourite post,
We chumped and chawed the buttered toast
They gave us for our tea."
My Fairy
© Lewis Carroll
When once a meal I wished to taste
It said "You must not bite"
When to the wars I went in haste
It said "You must not fight".
from To Alexis In Answer to His Poem Against Fruition
© Aphra Behn
Since man with that inconstancy was born,
To love the absent, and the present scorn
Why do we deck, why do we dress
For such short-lived happiness?
Why do we put attraction on,
Since either way tis we must be undone?
Laodamia
© André Breton
"With sacrifice before the rising morn
Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired;
And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required:
Celestial pity I again implore;—
Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!"
from A Moral Alphabet
© Hilaire Belloc
MORAL
If you were born to walk the ground,
Remain there; do not fool around.
Modern Love: I
© George Meredith
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
To a Reason
© Arthur Rimbaud
A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.
You look away: the new love!
You look back,—the new love!
The Seekonk Woods
© Washington Allston
When first I walked here I hobbled
along ties set too close together
Marrying the Hangman
© Margaret Atwood
She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
Beyond Hammonton
© Stephen Dunn
The back roads I’ve traveled late
at night, alone, a little drunk,
wishing I were someone
on whom nothing is lost,
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
The Amen Stone
© John Wesley
On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it,
a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed
Sonnet: I Thank You
© Henry Timrod
I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
