Work poems

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The Kindergarten Miss

© Edgar Albert Guest

The little kindergarten miss,

Source of all my joy and bliss,

The Inward Warfare

© John Newton

Strange and mysterious is my life,
What opposites I feel within!
A stable peace, a constant strife,
The rule of grace, the pow'r of sin:
Too often I am captive led,
Yet daily triumph in my Head.

Tales Of A Wayside Inn : Part 2. The Musician's Tale; The Ballad of Carmilhan - I.

© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

At Stralsund, by the Baltic Sea,
Within the sandy bar,
At sunset of a summer's day,
Ready for sea, at anchor lay
The good ship Valdemar.

Sumner

© John Greenleaf Whittier

O Mother State! the winds of March
Blew chill o'er Auburn's Field of God,
Where, slow, beneath a leaden arch
Of sky, thy mourning children trod.

Youth

© Arthur Rimbaud

I.
_Sunday_
Problems put by, the inevitable descent of heaven
and the visit of memories and the assembly
of rhythms occupy the house,
the head and the world of the spirit. --

Jolly Jack

© William Makepeace Thackeray

When fierce political debate

Throughout the isle was storming,

The Ring And The Book - Chapter VI - Giuseppe Caponsacchi

Again the morning found me. I will work,
Tie down my foolish thoughts. Thank God so far!
I have saved her from a scandal, stopped the tongues
Had broken else into a cackle and hiss
Around the noble name. Duty is still
Wisdom: I have been wise. So the day wore.

The Bethlehem Nursing Home by Rodney Torreson: American Life in Poetry #25 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Lau

© Ted Kooser

Emily Dickinson said that poems come at the truth at a slant. Here a birdbath and some overturned chairs on a nursing home lawn suggest the frailties of old age. Masterful poems choose the very best words and put them in the very best places, and Michigan poet Rodney Torreson has deftly chosen "ministers" for his first verb, an active verb that suggests the good work of the nursing home's chaplain.

From The Gulf

© William Henry Ogilvie

Store cattle from Nelanjie! The mob goes feeding past,

With half-a-mile of sandhill 'twixt the leaders and the last;

Shame

© Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev

Maybe, in my previous a-being,
Ive cut the throats of my Mom and Dad,
If in this one Lord of all the living! -
I have been doomed to suffering like that.

By The Seaside : The Building Of The Ship

© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

On the deck another bride
Is standing by her lover's side.
Shadows from the flags and shrouds,
Like the shadows cast by clouds,
Broken by many a sunny fleck,
Fall around them on the deck.

Italy : 51. Marco Griffoni

War is a game at which all are sure to lose, sooner or
later, play they how they will; yet every nation has
delighted in war, and none more in their day than the
little republic of Genoa, whose galleys, while she had

Garden

O painter of the fruits and flowers,
We own wise design,
Where these human hands of ours
May share work of Thine!

Angkor

I
Out of the Forest into a terrible splendour
Of noon, the pinnacles of the temple--portals,
Stone Faces, immense in carven ruin
Above the trembling of giant trees emerge.

Thissledown

The thissledown by wind's a-roll'd
In Fall along the zunny plaïn,
Did catch the grass, but lose its hold,
Or cling to bennets, but in vaïn.

Yellowjackets by Yusef Komunyakaa: American Life in Poetry #154 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-

© Ted Kooser

Here, poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York University, shows us a fine portrait of the hard life of a workerâin this case, a horseâand, through metaphor, the terrible, clumsy beauty of his final moments.

Yellowjackets