Work poems
/ page 276 of 355 /
You, Doctor Martin
© Anne Sexton
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
Rowing
© Anne Sexton
As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
This story ends with me still rowing.
The Break Away
© Anne Sexton
I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.
Doubtful Dreams
© Adam Lindsay Gordon
Aye, snows are rife in December,
And sheaves are in August yet,
Lines. "Upon the altar of my life there lies"
© Frances Anne Kemble
Upon the altar of my life there lies
A costly offering: its price I know;
Again and Again and Again
© Anne Sexton
You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
August 17th
© Anne Sexton
Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health.Surely I will be disquieted
by the hospital, that body zone--
bodies wrapped in elastic bands,
bodies cased in wood or used like telephones,
The Cut Finger
© Ellis Parker Butler
An shure, me lad, t is bleedin;
But come, me hearty laddy buck, be brave an do not cry;
A lad thats learnin readin shu'd be far beyant the heedin
Av a tiny bit o finger cut that hurrts a bit foreby.
Upon His Majesty's Happy Return
© Edmund Waller
The rising sun complies with our weak sight,
First gilds the clouds, then shows his globe of light
At such a distance from our eyes, as though
He knew what harm his hasty beams would do.
To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph
© Anne Sexton
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wintgs on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 02 - part 06
© Torquato Tasso
LXVI
"True labour in the vineyard of thy Lord,
Oh! Mr. Malthus!
© Stephen Leacock
Turn back to Malthus as he walked o'er English Fields and Downs
And walked at night the crooked Streets of crooked English Towns,
Lifeless, undying, Shade or Man, as one that could not die
A hundred years his Shadow fell, a hundred Years to lie,
The Shadow on the Window Pane when Malthus' Ghost went by.
The Knitters
© Padraic Colum
WATER, I did not seek you,
Water of hollow stone;
I crossed no one's acre to find you
You were where my geese lie down.
Invocation
© Alfred Austin
Where Apennine slopes unto Tuscan plain,
And breaks into dimples, and laughs to flowers,
To see where the terrors of Winter wane,
And out of a valley of grape and grain
There blossoms a City of domes and towers,
Hurry Up Please It's Time
© Anne Sexton
What is death, I ask.
What is life, you ask.
I give them both my buttocks,
my two wheels rolling off toward Nirvana.
England's Answer
© Rudyard Kipling
Truly ye come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban;
Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man.
Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;
Stark as your sons shall be - stern as your fathers were.
Barefoot
© Anne Sexton
Loving me with my shows off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
The Building Of The Cloud-Cuckoo-Town
© Aristophanes
_Mess_.--A most amazing, astonishing work it is!
So that Theagenes and Proxenides
Might flourish and gasconade and prance away
Quite at their ease, both of them four-in-hand,
Driving abreast upon the breadth of wall,
Each in his own new chariot.
