Work poems
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December Notes by Nancy McCleery: American Life in Poetry #39 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20
© Ted Kooser
Many of us keep journals, but while doing so few of us pay much attention to selecting the most precise words, to determining their most effective order, to working with effective pauses and breath-like pacing, to presenting an engaging impression of a single, unique day. This poem by Nebraskan Nancy McCleery is a good example of one poet’s carefully recorded observations.
December Notes
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
Life And Song.
© Sidney Lanier
"If life were caught by a clarionet,
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,
And utter its heart in every deed,
Paradise Lost : Book III.
© John Milton
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn,
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
The Dying Slave
© William Lisle Bowles
Faint-gazing on the burning orb of day,
When Afric's injured son expiring lay,
The Convict
© Robert Laurence Binyon
By the warm road--side, where chestnut and thorn
The brightness shaded, supine, at ease,
A felon, freed that morn,
Lay idle, and wondered, gazing up through the trees.
Joys of Spring
© Kristijonas Donelaitis
The climbing sun again was wakening the world
And laughing at the wreck of frigid winter's trade.
September
© Edgar Albert Guest
SEPTEMBER with her brushes dipped in dazzling red and gold
Now comes to paint the valleys and the hills;
La Corona
© John Donne
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise,
Weaved in my lone devout melancholy,
The Simple Toilers
© Edgar Albert Guest
JUST to do the little things
And do them well from day to day,
The Indian City
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
What deep wounds ever clos'd without a scar?
The heart's bleed longest, and but heal to wear
That which disfigures it.
Childe Harold
At The "Atlantic" Dinner
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
DECEMBER 15, 1874
I SUPPOSE it's myself that you're making allusion to
Of Hell And The Estate of Those Who Perish
© John Bunyan
hus, having show'd you what I see
Of heaven, I now will tell
You also, after search, what be
The damned wights of hell.
Don Juan: Canto The Eleventh
© George Gordon Byron
When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,'
And proved it--'twas no matter what he said:
On Bishop Burnet's Being Set On Fire In His Closet
© Thomas Parnell
Unwarn'd by this, go on the realm to fright,
Thou Briton, vaunting in thy second-sight;
In such a Ministry you safely tell,
How much you'd suffer, if Religion fell.
The Vulture and the Husbandman
© Arthur Clement Hilton
The papers they had finished lay
In piles of blue and white.
They answered every thing they could,
And wrote with all their might,
But, though they wrote it all by rote,
They did not write it right.
Hay-Meaken. Nunchen Time
© William Barnes
A.
Back here, but now, the jobber John
Come by, an' cried, "Well done, zing on,
I thought as I come down the hill,
A Father Out, An Mother Hwome
© William Barnes
The snow-white clouds did float on high
In shoals avore the sheenèn sky,
