Work poems
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Theme For English B
© Langston Hughes
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
The Negro Mother
© Langston Hughes
Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I'm reaching the goal.
Let America Be America Again
© Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
Mingus At The Showplace
© William Matthews
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen
and so I swung into action and wrote a poemand it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience shatliterature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar,casting beer money from a reel of ones,
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog
© William Matthews
Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I'll never know;
The Watchman
© Ada Cambridge
To mothers and to men;
To take him for our heaven-sent guide
On seas he never voyaged-wide
And wild beyond his ken.
The Moment
© Margaret Atwood
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
History of the Twentieth Century (A Roadshow)
© Joseph Brodsky
Ladies and gentlemen and the day!
All ye made of sweet human clay!
Let me tell you: you are o'kay.
A Notable Dinner
© Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer
Once the nation's chief was honored by the company of one,
Who to lift a fallen people had a work of worth begun,
Lofty things had he accomplished for a race so long despised,
In a land where naught but color by the whites are ever prized.
Siren Song
© Margaret Atwood
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
The Fan : A Poem. Book I.
© John Gay
The goddess pleas'd, the curious work receive,
Remounts her chariot, and the grotto leaves;
With the light fan she moves the yielding air,
And gales, till then unknown, play round the fair.
Song Of The Redwood-Tree
© Walt Whitman
A prophecy and indirection-a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing-or hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.
On The Yong Baronett Portman Dying Of An Impostume In's Head
© William Strode
Is Death so cunning now that all her blowe
Aymes at the heade? Doth now her wary Bowe
Make surer worke than heertofore? The steele
Slew warlike heroes onely in the heele.
The Wanderings Of Oisin: Book III
© William Butler Yeats
Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the Saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke;
The immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
On The Bible
© William Strode
Once more this mighty word his people greets,
Thus lapt and thus swath'd upp in paper sheets:
Read here God's Image with a zealous eye,
The legible and written Deity.
Full Moon and Little Frieda
© Ted Hughes
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
