Work poems
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It's the Little Towns I Like
© Thomas Lux
It’s the little towns I like
with their little mills making ratchets
Song: If you refuse me once, and think again
© Sir John Suckling
If you refuse me once, and think again,
I will complain.
You are deceiv’d, love is no work of art,
It must be got and born,
Not made and worn,
By every one that hath a heart.
Since the Cities are the Cities
© Henry Lawson
FOOLS can parrot-cry the prophet when the proof is close at hand,
And the blind can see the danger when the foe is in the land!
Truth was never cynicism, death or ruins not a joke,
Told-you-so is not a warningPatriotism not a croak.
For Laurel and Hardy on My Workroom Wall
© David Wagoner
Theyre tipping their battered derbies and striding forward
In step for a change, chipper, self-assured,
The Princess (part 4)
© Alfred Tennyson
But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and entered in,
There leaning deep in broidered down we sank
Our elbows: on a tripod in the midst
A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.
Life Cycle of Common Man
© Howard Nemerov
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
King Goodheart
© William Schwenck Gilbert
There lived a King, as I've been told
In the wonder-working days of old,
The Pillar Towers of Ireland
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
The pillar towers of Ireland, how wondrously they stand
By the lakes and rushing rivers through the valleys of our land;
In mystic file, through the isle, they lift their heads sublime,
These gray old pillar temples, these conquerors of time!
Mates
© Ada Cambridge
What brains these fragile webs enmesh!
What soaring thought they tie!
What energies of soul and flesh
Of The Nature Of Things: Book I - Part 03 - The Void
© Lucretius
But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked
About by body: there's in things a void-
Returning of Issue
© Henry Reed
Tomorrow will be your last day here. Someone is speaking:
A familiar voice, speaking again at all of us.
And beyond the windows it is inside now, and autumn
On a wind growing daily harsher, small things to the earth
Are turning and whirling, small. Tomorrow will be
Your last day here,
from Omeros
© Derek Walcott
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
San Biagio, at Montepulciano
© Raymond Carver
Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew
The ways you promise what you lack;
And that your bodies, like your souls,
Always slip from our grasping hands.
His Philosophy
© Edgar Albert Guest
JIM had a quaint philosophy,
"It ain't fer you, it's jes' fer me,"
From “Odi Barbare”
© Geoffrey Hill
xxiv
What is far hence led to the den of making:
Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy
Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Digging the Georgics
Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
It's two in the mornin' on Saturday night
At Rosalie's Good Eats Café.
