Work poems

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I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide:
I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide
In your gospelling glooms, -- to be
As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea.

Aholibah

© Algernon Charles Swinburne

IN the beginning God made thee
A woman well to look upon,
Thy tender body as a tree
Whereon cool wind hath always blown
Till the clean branches be well grown.

The Other Fathers by Lyn Lifshin : American Life in Poetry #251 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-

© Ted Kooser

The poet Lyn Lifshin, who divides her time between New York and Virginia, is one of the most prolific poets among my contemporaries, and has thousands of poems in print, by my loose reckoning. I have been reading her work in literary magazines for at least thirty years. Here’s a good example of this poet at her best.

A Debtor to Mercy Alone

© Augustus Montague Toplady

A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on, my person and offring to bring.
The terrors of law and of God with me can have nothing to do;
My Saviors obedience and blood hide all my transgressions from view.

Ave Caesar! Morituri Te Salutant

© Mary Hannay Foott

And they who raise it enter too,
With spectral looks and noiseless tread,
Unbidden, hold their dread review,
Beside the Emperors very bed.

Sentence And Torment Of The Condemned

© Michael Wigglesworth

Where tender love mens hearts did move unto a sympathy,
And bearing part of others smart in their anxiety;
Now such compassion is out of fashion, and wholly laid aside:
No Friends so near, but Saints to hear their Sentence can abide.

Love Worn by Lita Hooper: American Life in Poetry #75 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006

© Ted Kooser

In many American poems, the poet makes a personal appearance and offers us a revealing monologue from center stage, but there are lots of fine poems in which the poet, a stranger in a strange place, observes the lives of others from a distance and imagines her way into them. This poem by Lita Hooper is a good example of this kind of writing. Love Worn

In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago
a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth
each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder,
nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight.

There's Work To Be Done

© Wilcox Ella Wheeler

'Tis the song of the morning,

The words of the sun,

Abraham Davenport

© John Greenleaf Whittier

'T was on a May-day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring,
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness, like the night
In day of which the Norland sagas tell,--

Bagpipe Music

© Louis MacNeice

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.

A Man's A Man For A' That

© Charles Mackay

"A man's a man," says Robert Burns,

"For a' that and a' that";

The Botanic Garden (Part VII)

© Erasmus Darwin

THE LOVES OF THE PLANTS.

CANTO III.

Ballad Of The Army Carts

© Du Fu

Wagons rattling and banging,

horses neighing and snorting,

Ode To Liberty

© Percy Bysshe Shelley

Yet, Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-storm against the wind.--BYRON.
I.
A glorious people vibrated again

Rose Mary

Of her two fights with the Beryl-stone

Lost the first, but the second won.

Hero And Leander. The Fourth Sestiad

Now from Leander's place she rose, and found

Her hair and rent robe scatter'd on the ground;

The Golden Legend: III. A Street In Strasburg

_Crier of the dead (ringing a bell)._ Wake! wake!
All ye that sleep!
Pray for the Dead!
Pray for the Dead!

Battle Of Brunanburgh

Theirs was a greatness
Got from their Grandsires-
Theirs that so often in
Strife with their enemies
Struck for their hoards and their hearths and their homes.

Love's Reveller.

Hard have you won her, and must hold as fast!
She is Love's reveller those tawny eyes
Are up and down still in warm passion cast,
And woe betide the soul whom they surprise!

When We Understand The Plan

I reckon when the world we leave
And cease to smile and cease to grieve,
When each of us shall quit the strife
And drop the working tools of life,
Somewhere, somehow, we'll come to find
Just what our Maker had in mind.