Work poems
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Demolition
© Mark Doty
The intact facade's now almost black
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon,
when the backhoe claw appears above
three stories of columns and cornices,
Turtle, Swan
© Mark Doty
Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool
The Christian Slave
© John Greenleaf Whittier
A CHRISTIAN! going, gone!
Who bids for God's own image? for his grace,
Which that poor victim of the market-place
Hath in her suffering won?
Grenley Water
© William Barnes
The sheädeless darkness o' the night
Can never blind my mem'ry's zight;
The Embrace
© Mark Doty
You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
The Raft
© Vachel Lindsay
A banjo and a hymn are heard afar.
No solace on the lazy shore excels
The Duke's blue castle with its steamer-bells.
The floor is running water, and the roof
The stars' brocade with cloudy warp and woof.
The North And The South
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I
"Now give us lands where the olives grow,"
Cried the North to the South,
"Where the sun with a golden mouth can blow
Blow bubbles of grapes down a vineyard-row!"
Cried the North to the South.
The Meeting
© Robert Laurence Binyon
Faces of blank decorum, and bald heads
And the drone of a voice saying what none denies;
Words like cobwebs, scarcely stirred by a breath,
Loosely hanging, gray in an unswept corner;
Considering The Snail
© Thom Gunn
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
A Dedication
© Robert Burns
The Poet, some guid angel help him,
Or else, I fear, some ill ane skelp him!
He may do weel for a' he's done yet,
But only-he's no just begun yet.
Fergus Falling
© Galway Kinnell
He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich
Ode To Walt Whitman
© Stephen Vincent Benet
"Let me taste all, my flesh and my fat are sweet,
My body hardy as lilac, the strong flower.
I have tasted the calamus; I can taste the nightbane."
Thirty Bob a Week
© John Davidson
I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth -- I hope, like you --
On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
I'm a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.
The Chimney - Sweeper
© William Blake
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry "Weep! weep! weep! weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
What The Engines Said
© Francis Bret Harte
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching,--head to head
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?
This is what the Engines said,
Unreported and unread.
The Rhyme of the Three Greybeards
© Henry Lawson
He'd been for years in Sydney "a-acting of the goat",
His name was Joseph Swallow, "the Great Australian Pote",
In spite of all the stories and sketches that he wrote.
Rembrandts
© Madison Julius Cawein
I shall not soon forget her and her eyes,
The haunts of hate, where suffering seemed to write
Its own dark name, whose syllables are sighs,
In strange and starless night.
