Women poems
/ page 122 of 142 /
A Ballad of Burdens
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Princes, and ye whom pleasure quickeneth,
Heed well this rhyme before your pleasure tire;
For life is sweet, but after life is death.
This is the end of every man's desire.
A Ballad of Death
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears,
Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth
Upon the sides of mirth,
Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears
Across the Sea Along the Shore
© Arthur Hugh Clough
Across the sea, along the shore,
In numbers more and ever more,
From lonely hut and busy town,
The valley through, the mountain down,
The Burglar Of Babylon
© Elizabeth Bishop
On the fair green hills of Rio
There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
And can't go home again.
The Map
© Elizabeth Bishop
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
In The Waiting Room
© Elizabeth Bishop
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
A Dream
© William Allingham
I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night;
I went to the window to see the sight;
All the Dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.
What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner Or Later
© Ogden Nash
Husbands are things that wives have to get used to putting up with.
And with whom they breakfast with and sup with.
They interfere with the discipline of nurseries,
And forget anniversaries,
Peekabo, I Almost See You
© Ogden Nash
Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to
lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes
are all right but your arm isn't long
The Old Women Of The Ocean
© Pablo Neruda
To the solemn sea the old women come
With their shawls knotted around their necks
With their fragile feet cracking.
My Land
© Thomas Osborne Davis
She is a rich and rare land;
Oh! she's a fresh and fair land;
She is a dear and rare land--
This native land of mine.
Gentleman Alone
© Pablo Neruda
The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
Damascus, What Are You Doing to Me?
© Nizar Qabbani
3
I return to the womb in which I was formed . . .
To the first book I read in it . . .
To the first woman who taught me
The geography of love . . .
And the geography of women . . .
Five Letters To My Mother
© Nizar Qabbani
Good morning sweetheart.
Good morning my Saint of a sweetheart.
In The Harbour: Auf Wiedersehen
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Until we meet again! That is the meaning
Of the familiar words, that men repeat
At parting in the street.
Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening
Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain
We wait for the Again!
Children's Party
© Ogden Nash
May I join you in the doghouse, Rover?
I wish to retire till the party's over.
Since three o'clock I've done my best
To entertain each tiny guest. My conscience now I've left behind me,
At the Vietnam War Memorial
© Craig Erick Chaffin
Black granite stretches its harsh, tapering wings
up to pedestrian-level grass
but sucks me down, here, at the intersection of names.
I forgive, I must, though I wish something
could heal this wound in the earth.
Drug Trial
© Craig Erick Chaffin
You saw rattlesnakes mate in the arroyo
tangled like hoses, braided
like black ropes for a day,
utterly vulnerable in the grip
of love or instinct.
Year's End
© Marilyn Hacker
Twice in my quickly disappearing forties
someone called while someone I loved and I were
making love to tell me another woman had died of cancer.
