Work poems
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The Song of Songs
© King Solomon
The Song of songs, which is Solomon's.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is better than wine.
Because of the savor of thy good ointments
thy name is as ointment poured forth,
therefore do the virgins love thee.
On A Diet
© William Matthews
to the heaven of revisions. Why be
adipose: an expense, etc.,
in a waste, etc.? Something like
the body of the poet’s work, with its
pale shadows, begins to pare and replace
the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?
Amoretti LXXXI: Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares
© Edmund Spenser
Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares,
With the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke:
Ave Atque Vale
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
In Memory of Charles Baudelaire
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
Pumberly Pott’s Unpredictable Niece
© Jack Prelutsky
Pumberly Pott’s unpredictable niece
declared with her usual zeal
that she would devour, by piece after piece,
her uncle’s new automobile.
Bahaman
© Bliss William Carman
To T. B. M.
IN the crowd that thronged the pierhead, come to see their friends take ship
By The Fireside : The Builders
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.
America
© Allen Ginsberg
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
When Mother Cooked With Wood
© Edgar Albert Guest
I do not quarrel with the gas,
Our modern range is fine,
Reserve
© Louise Imogen Guiney
You that are dear, O you above the rest!
Forgive him his evasive moods and cold;
Laugh and be Merry
© John Masefield
Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.
Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.
Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.
Marry Me by Veronica Patterson: American Life in Poetry #172 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
I don't often talk about poetic forms in this column, thinking that most of my readers aren't interested in how the clock works and would rather be given the time. But the following poem by Veronica Patterson of Colorado has a subtitle referring to a form, the senryu, and I thought it might be helpful to mention that the senryu is a Japanese form similar to haiku but dealing with people rather than nature. There; enough said. Now you can forget the form and enjoy the poem, which is a beautiful sketch of a marriage.
Marry Me
when I come late to bed
I move your leg flung over my sideâ
that warm gate
Not Understood
© George MacDonald
Tumultuous rushing o'er the outstretched plains;
A wildered maze of comets and of suns;
Hartley Field
© Connie Wanek
And you, whom I have heard breathe all night,
sigh through the water of sleep
with vestigial gills . . .
Amoretti XXIII: Penelope for her Ulisses sake
© Edmund Spenser
Penelope for her Ulisses sake,
Devizd a Web her wooers to deceave:
