Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
...
FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale;
Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale,
Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain.
...
Crabbed Age and Youth
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
...
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
...
Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
...
Love and harmony combine,
And round our souls entwine
While thy branches mix with mine,
And our roots together join.
...
A green and silent spot, amid the hills,
A small and silent dell ! O'er stiller place
No singing sky-lark ever poised himself.
...
Christmas is come and every hearth
Makes room to give him welcome now
E'en want will dry its tears in mirth
And crown him wi' a holly bough
...
The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring;
...
WHY! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
...
But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:
They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,
In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe:
...
Golden Apollo, that thro' heaven wide
Scatter'st the rays of light, and truth's beams,
In lucent words my darkling verses dight,
And wash my earthy mind in thy clear streams,
...
O Sovereign power of love! O grief! O balm!
All records, saving thine, come cool, and calm,
And shadowy, through the mist of passed years:
For others, good or bad, hatred and tears
...
I am in this low-slung sports car
painted a deep, rich yellow
driving under an Italian sun.
I have a British accent.
...
All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
...
Full many a dreary hour have I past,
My brain bewildered, and my mind o'ercast
With heaviness; in seasons when I've thought
No spherey strains by me could e'er be caught
...
O Lord, our father,
Our young patriots, idols of our hearts,
Go forth to battle - be Thou near them!
With them, in spirit, we also go forth
...
Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
He at length our good will sever.
...
As late I journey'd o'er the extensive plain
Where native Otter sports his scanty stream,
Musing in torpid woe a Sister's pain,
The glorious prospect woke me from the dream.
...
YE learned sisters, which have oftentimes
Beene to me ayding, others to adorne,
Whom ye thought worthy of your gracefull rymes,
That even the greatest did not greatly scorne
...
How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride
'Til the prince of love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
...
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
...
The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
...
It made her feel sad and embarrassed
Situation was so sudden and not assessed
Circumstances too were not so pressed
Emotions ran high and worries suddenly traced
...
But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:
They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,
...
Come, kings, and listen to my song:
When Gwin, the son of Nore,
Over the nations of the North
His cruel sceptre bore;
...
Upon that night, when fairies light
On Cassilis Downans dance,
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze,
On sprightly coursers prance;
...
Cricket's Demi-gods and Villains
Till yesterday, there were no odds,
...
A Pastorall Elegie vpon the death of the most Noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney.
Dedicated To the most beautifull and vertuous Ladie, the Countesse of Essex.
...
He has better luck with women. He doesn't
obsess over them, walks next to them
with an easy gait, much like his unforced
conversation. His smile is spontaneous,
...
Christmass is come and every hearth
Makes room to give him welcome now
Een want will dry its tears in mirth
And crown him wi a holly bough
...
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,
How the handsome Yenadizze
Danced at Hiawatha's wedding;
...
SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me!
Hour prophetic--hour resuming the past!
Inflating my throat--you, divine average!
...
There is a lady sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleas'd my mind;
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.
...
. "With sacrifice before the rising morn
Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired;
And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required:
...
I NEED no assurances--I am a man who is preoccupied, of his own Soul;
I do not doubt that from under the feet, and beside the hands and
face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not
...
A storm was coming, but the winds were still,
And in the wild woods of Broceliande,
Before an oak, so hollow, huge and old
It looked a tower of ivied masonwork,
...
THE FIRST BOOK
I, WHO erewhile the happy Garden sung
By one man's disobedience lost, now sing
...
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is ...
...
I.
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
...
Out of childhood into manhood
Now had grown my Hiawatha,
Skilled in all the craft of hunters,
...
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
...
I.
Ah! wherefore by the Church-yard side,
Poor little LORN ONE, dost thou stray?
...
BOOK I
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide
...
In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad, in furious guise,
Along the Appian way.
...
From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth:
...
(dedicated to people who love sports)
citius
altius
...
Your gentle yawn
while reading the sports section
as they fill your prescription.
A light scratch of your nose
...
Twenty-Two stalwarts in stripes and shorts
Kicking a ball along,
Set in a square of leather-lunged sports
Twenty-two thousand strong,
...
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness
And burdenous corpulence my love had grown,
But that I did, to make it less,
And keep it in proportion,
...
To all of my friends
The old with the new
Elderly and young
At Poem Hunter
...
No news of navies burnt at seas;
No noise of late spawn'd tittyries;
No closet plot or open vent,
That frights men with a Parliament:
...
PALLAS, attending to the Muse's song,
Approv'd the just resentment of their wrong;
And thus reflects: While tamely I commend
Those who their injur'd deities defend,
...
Come queen of months in company
Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
...
Shepherd. That cry's from the first cuckoo of the year.
I wished before it ceased.
Goatherd. Nor bird nor beast
...
Perplexed and troubled at his bad success
The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,
Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope
So oft, and the persuasive rhetoric
...
Here's a health to every sportsman, be he stableman or lord,
If his heart be true, I care not what his pocket may afford;
...
Make America Great again
By cleaning the lakes and rivers
And stop poisoning the land
Let's stop this division between of everything
...
Indeed I still struggle
Swimming upstream with might
Never giving up on what I care for
Because a strong woman, I am
...
THENCE, in his saffron robe, for distant Thrace,
Hymen departs, thro' air's unmeasur'd space;
By Orpheus call'd, the nuptial Pow'r attends,
But with ill-omen'd augury descends;
...
Farewell! but whenever you welcome the hour
That awakens the night-song of mirth in your bower,
Then think of the friend who once welcomed it too,
And forgot his own griefs to be happy with you.
...
The morning sun touched lightly on
The eyes of Lucy Jordan
In her white suburban bedroom
In a white suburban town,
...
Glion?--Ah, twenty years, it cuts
All meaning from a name!
White houses prank where once were huts.
Glion, but not the same!
...
tenth in the sprint
ninth in the four hundred
eighth in the cross-country
seventh in the potato race
...
Shepherd. That cry's from the first cuckoo of the year.
I wished before it ceased.
Goatherd. Nor bird nor beast
Could make me wish for anything this day,
...
Hail, mildly pleasing solitude,
Companion of the wise and good;
But, from whose holy, piercing eye,
The herd of fools, and villains fly.
...
Love, that long since hast to thy mighty powre
Perforce subdude my poor captived hart,
And raging now therein with restlesse stowre,
...
I saw the sun step like a gentleman
Dressed in black and proud as sin.
I saw the sun walk across London
Like a young M. P., risen to the occasion.
...
Siren. COME, worthy Greek! Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
...
The Honorable Ardleigh Wyse
Was every fisherman's despair;
He caught his fish on floating flies,
In fact he caught them in the air,
...
PART I
On Susquehanna's side, fair Wyoming!
Although the wild-flower on thy ruin'd wall,
...
A BUSY town mid Britain's isle,
Behold in fancy's eye ;
With tower, and spire, and civic pile,
Beneath a summer sky :
...
A good man is seized by the police
and spirited away. Months later
someone brags that he shot him once
through the back of the head
...
There were three in the meadow by the brook,
Gathering up windrows, piling haycocks up,
With an eye always lifted toward the west,
...
Wrong'd, yet not daring to expresse my paine,
To you (great Lord) the causer of my care,
In clowdie teares my case I thus complaine
...
Such _wast_ thou: now in earth below,
Dust and a skeleton thou art.
...
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visits paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
...
1918
God rest you, peaceful gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,
...
See how, like lightest waves at play, the airy dancers fleet;
And scarcely feels the floor the wings of those harmonious feet.
Ob, are they flying shadows from their native forms set free?
Or phantoms in the fairy ring that summer moonbeams see?
...
My wonderful son has a way with the girls -
He's tough and he's buff, and he has lots of curls -
He loves to play sports and he's usually found
Lifting, or batting or golfing a round;
...
On the children's day,
To the Lord I pray.
May God bless,
To one and all success.
...
Oh, my beloved companion!
Oh thou of my existence,
The very heart and soul!
...
If from great nature's or our own abyss
Of thought we could but snatch a certainty,
Perhaps mankind might find the path they miss--
But then 'twould spoil much good philosophy.
...
Part the First.
Henry, our royall kind, would ride a hunting
To the greene forest so pleasant and faire;
...
"O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
...
Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood
Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round,
At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods,
Danced like a wither'd leaf before the hall.
...
Game of forward motion, kick, score,
Game of vibrant commotion, quick, dare,
Game of active promotion, lively, exciting.
Game of euphoric emotion, delightful, cheering!
...
WHEN Contemplation, like the night-calm felt
Through earth and sky, spreads widely, and sends deep
Into the soul its tranquillising power,
...
A Monday morning. Early spring.
No work today—nor worries.
Setting out to walk three errands
he is greeted by a house finch singing.
...
I thought I’d write a bad poem, one for the ages, signifying nothing.
Pavement suffocates the living earth just as bad poetry fills volumes.
Still, oblivious to the land’s rape, the masses enjoy sentimental blathering,
And all is well since professional wrestling rules even sports columns.
...
[As a Tribute of Esteem and Admiration this Poem is inscribed to ROBERT MERRY, Esq. A. M. Member of the Royal Academy at Florence, and Author of the Laurel of Liberty, and the Della Crusca Poems.]
O THOU, to whom superior worth's allied,
...
--Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov'd
To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
...
It was a super Saturday,
When Neeraj Chopra,
The handsome boy from Panipat
Stole millions of hearts in India,
...
A Tale
'Twas in that place o' Scotland's isle,
That bears the name o' auld King Coil,
...
Once to the song and chariot-fight,
Where all the tribes of Greece unite
On Corinth's isthmus joyously,
The god-loved Ibycus drew nigh.
...
Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world--a world how lovely then!--
And guided still the steps of happy men
In the light leading-strings of careless joy!
...
High on a gorgeous seat, that far out-shone
Henley's gilt tub, or Flecknoe's Irish throne,
Or that where on her Curlls the public pours,
...
Last
Pleasant morning walk
Poignant prayers
Holy visit for worship
...