Work poems
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Convict Once - Part First.
© James Brunton Stephens
I.
FREE again! Free again! eastward and westward, before me, behind me,
Wide lies Australia! and free are my feet, as my soul is, to roam!
Oh joy unwonted of space undetermined! No limit assigned me!
Freedom conditioned by nought save the need and desire of a home!
To Mr Fashionable Fiancee
© Peter McArthur
I SOMETIMES think it would be sweet
If we were like the olden lovers
The simple-hearted ones we meet
In musty books with vellum covers.
Song of Myself
© Walt Whitman
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
The Hour Of Prayer
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Child, amidst the flowers at play,
While the red light fades away;
The Blind Reader.
© Robert Crawford
His blindness lends a magic to his fingers,
As if his seeing subtlety were sensed
In them, and his wits left his eyes to work
In the nimble digits as they read for him.
The Times
© Charles Churchill
The time hath been, a boyish, blushing time,
When modesty was scarcely held a crime;
To Shakespeare
© Frances Anne Kemble
Oft, when my lips I open to rehearse
Thy wondrous spell of wisdom, and of power,
The Slave Trade, A Poem
© Hannah More
If heaven has into being deign'd to call
Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all;
The Burning Babe
© Robert Southwell
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
Crusoe in England
© Elizabeth Bishop
A new volcano has erupted,
the papers say, and last week I was reading
A Voice From The Bush
© Anonymous
High noon, and not a cloud in the sky
To break this blinding sun.
Well, I've half the day before me still,
And most of my journey done.
Alimony
© Sheldon Allan Silverstein
Alimony alimony I work till my fingers are bloody and boney
Me oh my oh goodness sake I'm paying for my mistake
She calls it alimony alimony yeah you single men may think it's funny
Till one of these days you're gonna wake and find you're payin' for your mistake
Hard Work
© Roddy Lumsden
Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself,
ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat
(a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada,
a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).
The Painter
© John Ashbery
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
To Whistler, American
© Ezra Pound
On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.
You also, our first great,
Had tried all ways;
Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,
And this much gives me heart to play the game.
Questions About Angels
© Billy Collins
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
The Landgraff
© Frances Anne Kemble
Through Thuringia's forest green
The Landgraff rode at close of e'en;
Book Of Proverbs
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
CALL on the present day and night for nought,
Save what by yesterday was brought.
The Book of the Dead Man (#3)
© Marvin Bell
When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research
