Work poems
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Lullaby
© William Butler Yeats
Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?
Vacillation
© William Butler Yeats
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
The Ballad Of Moll Magee
© William Butler Yeats
Come round me, little childer;
There, don't fling stones at me
Because I mutter as I go;
But pity Moll Magee.
The Song Of The Old Mother
© William Butler Yeats
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
Walter Savage Landor
© Dorothy Parker
Upon the work of Walter Landor
I am unfit to write with candor.
If you can read it, well and good;
But as for me, I never could.
Distance
© Dorothy Parker
Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.
Coda
© Dorothy Parker
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Alexandre Dumas And His Son
© Dorothy Parker
Although I work, and seldom cease,
At Dumas pere and Dumas fils,
Alas, I cannot make me care
For Dumas fils and Dumas pere.
Satyr
© John Wilmot
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare,
A Satyre Against Mankind
© John Wilmot
Thus sir, you see what human nature craves,
Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves;
The difference lies, as far as I can see.
Not in the thing itself, but the degree;
And all the subject matter of debate
Is only, who's a knave of the first rate
An Allusion to Horace
© John Wilmot
Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes,
Were stoln, unequal, nay dull many times:
What foolish Patron, is there found of his,
So blindly partial, to deny me this?
Taxi Suite (excerpt: 1. After Anacreon)
© Lew Welch
When I drive cab
I am the hunter. My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures
Flowering Eucalypt In Autumn
© Les Murray
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
The Butter Factory
© Les Murray
It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
The Quality Of Sprawl
© Les Murray
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever
© Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine
© Mary Oliver
Who doesnt love
roses, and who
doesnt love the lilies
of the black ponds
Dogfish
© Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.
