Work poems
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This Morning
© Charles Simic
Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.
I'm just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Eyes Fastened With Pins
© Charles Simic
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
The School Of Metaphysics
© Charles Simic
Executioner happy to explain
How his wristwatch works
As he shadows me on the street.
I call him that because he is grim and officious
And wears black.
The Rose Family - Song 1
© Louisa May Alcott
O flower at my window
Why blossom you so fair,
With your green and purple cup
Upturned to sun and air?
What The Lord Saith
© George MacDonald
Trust my father, saith the eldest-born;
I did trust him ere the earth began;
Not to know him is to be forlorn;
Not to love him is-not to be man.
The Patrol And The Gold-Digger
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Gordon, mounted, loq.
Ho ! you chap of grit and sinew,
Smoking in your pit,
Why thus labour discontinue ?
Why your forehead knit ?
The Phantom Bells
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
Upveiled in yonder dim ethereal sea,
Its airy towers the work of phantom spells,
The Columbiad: Book X
© Joel Barlow
From that mark'd stage of man we now behold,
More rapid strides his coming paths unfold;
His continents are traced, his islands found,
His well-taught sails on all his billows bound,
His varying wants their new discoveries ply,
And seek in earth's whole range their sure supply.
The Withdrawal
© Robert Lowell
This week the house went on the market—
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and joins another room.
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
© Robert Lowell
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
Skunk Hour
© Robert Lowell
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The Prophecy Of St. Oran: Part I
© Mathilde Blind
"Earth, earth on the mouth of Oran, that he may blab no more." Gaelic Proverb.
When Dawn Comes to the City
© Claude McKay
The tired cars go grumbling by,
The moaning, groaning cars,
And the old milk carts go rumbling by
Under the same dull stars.
The Tired Worker
© Claude McKay
O whisper, O my soul! The afternoon
Is waning into evening, whisper soft!
Peace, O my rebel heart! for soon the moon
From out its misty veil will swing aloft!
Of The Mole In The Ground
© John Bunyan
The mole's a creature very smooth and slick,
She digs i' th' dirt, but 'twill not on her stick;
Green Grow The Rashes
© Robert Burns
Chorus: Green grow the rashes, O!
Green grow the rashes, O!
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend,
Are spent amang the lasses, O!
Third Sunday In Advent
© John Keble
What went ye out to see
O'er the rude sandy lea,
Where stately Jordan flows by many a palm,
Or where Gennesaret's wave
Delights the flowers to lave,
That o'er her western slope breathe airs of balm.
The Trumpet Call
© Alfred Noyes
Trumpeter, sound for the last Crusade!
Sound for the fire of the red-cross kings,
Sound for the passion, the splendour, the pity
That swept the world for a dead Man's sake,
