Work poems

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House: Some Instructions

© Grace Paley

If you have a house
you must think about it all the time
as you reside in the house so
it must be a home in your mind

Amoretti LXXI: I joy to see how in your drawen work

© Edmund Spenser

I joy to see how in your drawen work,

Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare;

Nights of 1964—1966: The Old Reliable

© Marilyn Hacker

for Lewis Ellingham
The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, “In a Notebook”

The Cleaving

© Li-Young Lee

He gossips like my grandmother, this man

with my face, and I could stand

1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Work without Hope

© Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lines Composed 21st February 1825

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—

A Plagued Journey

© Jon Anderson

There is no warning rattle at the door

nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.

The Tale of Sunlight

© Gary Soto

Listen, nephew.

When I opened the cantina

There Are Black

© James Russell Lowell

And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .

Manifest

© Reginald Shepherd

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body
master snapping masts in half, absent
winds’ workmanship: what window
will I look you through, what brook, stream

Skin Cancer

© Mark Jarman

Balmy overcast nights of late September;

Palms standing out in street light, house light;

Workshop

© Billy Collins

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease

© Alfred Tennyson

You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.

Phases

© Edwin Muir

I.
There’s a little square in Paris,
Waiting until we pass.
They sit idly there,
They sip the glass.

Recreation

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.

Song of the Open Road

© Walt Whitman

1
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Morning of Drunkenness

O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.