Work poems
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The Hearts
© Robert Pinsky
The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,
The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills
And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies
Stray Pleasures
© William Wordsworth
BY their floating mill,
That lies dead and still,
Behold yon Prisoners three,
The Miller with two Dames, on the breast of the Thames!
The platform is small, but gives room for them all;
And they're dancing merrily.
Canto XLIX: For the Seven Lakes
© Ezra Pound
For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.
Blowfly
© Andrew Hudgins
Half? awake, I was imagining
a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth
The Played-Out Humorist
© William Schwenck Gilbert
Oh happy was that humorist - the first that made a pun at all -
Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean,
Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all -
How popular at dinners must that humorist have been!
The Troubadour. Canto 1
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
There is a light step passing by
Like the distant sound of music's sigh;
It is that fair and gentle child,
Whose sweetness has so oft beguiled,
Like sunlight on a stormy day,
His almost sullenness away.
Falling Asleep over the Aeneid
© Robert Lowell
An old man in Concord forgets to go to morning service. He falls asleep, while reading Vergil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince.
The sun is blue and scarlet on my page,
Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)
© Edward Hirsch
A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
© Thomas Stearns Eliot
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Fragment: Yes! All Is Past
© Percy Bysshe Shelley
'Ah! no, I cannot shed the pitying tear,
This breast is cold, this heart can feel no more--
But I can rest me on thy chilling bier,
Can shriek in horror to the tempest's roar.'
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
© Roald Dahl
(In Springfield, Illinois)
It is portentous, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house pacing up and down.
Poem about People
© Robert Pinsky
The jaunty crop-haired graying
Women in grocery stores,
Their clothes boyish and neat,
New mittens or clean sneakers,
The Ballad Of The Taylor Pup
© Eugene Field
Now lithe and listen, gentles all,
Now lithe ye all and hark
Unto a ballad I shall sing
About Buena Park.
Grace
© Joy Harjo
Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.
I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.
I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.
Washing Day
© Bliss William Carman
The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
The Stringy-Bark Cockatoo
© Anonymous
I'm a broken-hearted miner, who loves his cup to drain,
Which often-times has caused me to lie in frost and rain.
Roaming about the country, looking for some work to do,
I got a job of reaping off a stringy-bark cockatoo.
Michael: A Pastoral Poem
© William Wordsworth
Thus in his Father's sight the Boy grew up:
And now, when he had reached his eighteenth year,
He was his comfort and his daily hope.
The Old Major Explains
© Francis Bret Harte
Well, you see, the fact is, Colonel, I don't know as I can come:
For the farm is not half planted, and there's work to do at home;
And my leg is getting troublesome,--it laid me up last fall,--
And the doctors, they have cut and hacked, and never found the ball.
