Work poems
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A Song To David
© Christopher Smart
I
O THOU, that sit'st upon a throne,
With harp of high majestic tone,
To praise the King of kings;
The Cities Of White Men
© Anonymous
Those men build many houses:
They dig the earth, and they build;
They cut down the trees, and they build;
They work always - building.
How The Cat Was Belled
© Carolyn Wells
The poor rats were at their wits' end
Their homes and families to defend;
And as a last resort
They took the case to court.
We Are The Choice Of The Will
© William Ernest Henley
We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of their very
thrones;
The secret parts of the world were salted with our bones;
The Wanderer: A Vision: Canto I
© Richard Savage
The solar fires now faint and wat'ry burn,
Just where with ice Aquarius frets his urn!
If thaw'd, forth issue, from its mouth severe,
Raw clouds, that sadden all th' inverted year.
Hudibras: Part 2 - Canto III
© Samuel Butler
Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated as to cheat;
As lookers-on feel most delight,
That least perceive a jugler's slight;
And still the less they understand,
The more th' admire his slight of hand.
To One Who Bade Him Work
© Edith Nesbit
EACH day Work bids my heart anew,
Fold wings and watch my brain at play;
But brain and heart will fly your way,
And find their natural home in you!
Come to me--'tis the only way!
The Waggoner - Canto Fourth
© William Wordsworth
THUS they, with freaks of proud delight,
Beguile the remnant of the night;
And many a snatch of jovial song
Regales them as they wind along;
Daughter
© Gertrude Stein
Why is the world at peace.
This may astonish you a little but when you realise how
easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American
painters to American millionaires you will recognize that
Upon The Pismire
© John Bunyan
Must we unto the pismire go to school,
To learn of her in summer to provide
The Voices
© John Greenleaf Whittier
"WHY urge the long, unequal fight,
Since Truth has fallen in the street,
Or lift anew the trampled light,
Quenched by the heedless million's feet?
The Light By The Barn
© William Stafford
The light by the barn that shines all night
pales at dawn when a little breeze comes.A little breeze comes breathing the fields
from their sleep and waking the slow windmill.The slow windmill sings the long day
about anguish and loss to the chickens at work.The little breeze follows the slow windmill
Lives
© Arthur Rimbaud
I remember silver hours and sunlight by the rivers,
the hand of the country on my shoulder
and our carresses standing on the spicy plains.--
A flight of scarlet pigeons thunders round my thoughts.
December 14
© David Lehman
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere,
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
That never touch with inarticulate pang
The Body of Divinity Versifyed
© Cotton Mather
A God there is, a God of boundless Might,
In Wisdom, Justice, Goodness, Infinite.
Operation Memory
© David Lehman
We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.
Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack
© Rudyard Kipling
As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled
Once, twice, and again!
And a doe leaped up - and a doe leaped up
From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.
This I, scouting alone, beheld,
Once, twice, and again!
Ninth Inning
© David Lehman
He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day,
Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm,
Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate
Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said
Sappers
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!
Wittgenstein's Ladder
© David Lehman
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
