Work poems
/ page 195 of 355 /
Child on the Marsh
© Andrew Hudgins
I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling
in mud holes underneath tree roots.
From Violence to Peace
© James Russell Lowell
Twenty-eight shotgun pellets
crater my thighs, belly and groin.
I gently thumb each burnt bead,
fingering scabbed stubs with ointment.
Sexsmith the Dentist
© Edgar Lee Masters
Do you think that odes and sermons,
And the ringing of church bells,
Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman
© André Breton
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
The Negative
© Wole Soyinka
A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever.
Inside a temple, instead of light
Confiteor
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
The shore-boat lies in the morning light,
By the good ship ready for sailing;
In Memory of the Utah Stars
© William Matthews
Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling’s body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.
What My Father Left Behind
© Georg Trakl
Jam jar of cigarette ends and ashes on his workbench,
hammer he nailed our address to a stump with,
balsa wood steamship, half-finished—
Medea in Athens
© Augusta Davies Webster
Dimly I recall
some prophecy a god breathed by my mouth.
It could not err. What was it? For I think;-
it told his death¹.
Emergency Haying
© Hayden Carruth
Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,
Decline and Fall
© Daniel Nester
Cornice rose in ranges, rose so high
It saw no sky, that forum, but noon sky.
Marble shone like shallows; columns too
Streamed with cool light as rocks in breakers do.
