Women poems
/ page 69 of 142 /
A Hall
© Czeslaw Milosz
The road led straight to the temple.
Notre Dame, though not Gothic at all.
The huge doors were closed. I chose one on the side,
Not to the main building-to its left wing,
And Yet The Books
© Czeslaw Milosz
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
I Sleep a Lot
© Czeslaw Milosz
When I couldn't do without alcohol, I drove myself on alcohol,
When I couldn't do without cigarettes and coffee, I drove myself
On cigarettes and coffee.
I was courageous. Industrious. Nearly a model of virtue.
But that is good for nothing.
Song on the End of the World
© Czeslaw Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
From the House of Yemanjá
© Elizabeth Daryush
All this has been
before
in my mother's bed
time has no sense
I have no brothers
and my sisters are cruel.
Preludes
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Phenomenal Woman
© Jon Anderson
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
Instructions for Building Straw Huts
© Yusef Komunyakaa
First you must have
unbelievable faith in water,
Charlie Howard’s Descent
© Mark Doty
Between the bridge and the river
he falls through
a huge portion of night;
it is not as if falling
An Anatomy of the World
© John Donne
(excerpt)
AN ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
Wherein,
by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress
The Watchers
© William Stanley Braithwaite
Two women on the lone wet strand
(The wind's out with a will to roam)
The waves wage war on rocks and sand,
(And a ship is long due home.)
The Rebel
© Hilaire Belloc
There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.
Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet
© Lord Byron
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
The Operation
© Anne Sexton
Clean of the body’s hair,
I lie smooth from breast to leg.
All that was special, all that was rare
is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
Blue Ridge
© Ellen Bryant Voigt
Up there on the mountain road, the fireworks
blistered and subsided, for once at eye level:
Poem
© Katha Pollitt
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
They Clapped
© Nikki Giovanni
they clapped when they took off
for home despite the dead
dream they saw a free future
