Best Paris Poems

A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry


To you, my aunt, who would explore
...

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
...

Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful
And I get tearful when I've downed a drink or two.
I'm one of your talking wounded.
I'm a hostage. I'm maroonded.
...

A Life Tragedy

A pistol shot rings round and round the world;
In pitiful defeat a warrior lies.
...

Trois allumettes une à une allumées dans la nuit
La premiére pour voir ton visage tout entier
La seconde pour voir tes yeux
La dernière pour voir ta bouche
...

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
...

The city's all a-shining
Beneath a fickle sun,
A gay young wind's a-blowing,
The little shower is done.
...

'Tis fine to see the Old World and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumblyh castles and the statues and kings
But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.
...

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,
and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like
insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,
says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too.
...

never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
...

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris- it does not bother me-
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
...

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
...

Though nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
...

[November 13,2015, Paris - Europe, our world]
...

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
...

<i>1856</i>

Paris, from throats of iron, silver, brass,
Joy-thundering cannon, blent with chiming bells,
...

In places like
Selma, Alabama,
Kids say,
In places like
...

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
...

The sunshine seeks my little room
To tell me Paris streets are gay;
That children cry the lily bloom
All up and down the leafy way;
...

I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the painting
of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay
among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes
...

The changing light
                 at San Francisco
       is none of your East Coast light
                none of your
...

Hypochondriacs
Spend the winter at the bottom of Florida and the summer on top of
the Adirondriacs.
You go to Paris and live on champagne wine and cognac
...

"Aug." 10, 1911.

Full moon to-night; and six and twenty years
Since my full moon first broke from angel spheres!
...

We have seen the Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
...

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
...

Walking swiftly with a dreadful duchess,
He smiled too briefly, his face was pale as sand,
He jumped into a taxi when he saw me coming,
Leaving my alone with a private meaning,
...

Thee the ancientest peer, Duke of Burgundy, rose from the monarch's right hand, red as wines
From his mountains; an odor of war, like a ripe vineyard, rose from his garments,
...

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
...

BRING me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
May call down curses on his head
Because of my dear Jack that's dead.
...

THE LADY.

IN the small and great world too,
...

Poem Hunter you are really a pretty queen,
You are ruler we are people we are tween.

Gene of poetry you inherit for generation,
...

Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,
Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.
...

Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?
...

No, for I'll save it! Seven years since
I passed through Paris, stopped a day
To see the baptism of your Prince,
...

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:
But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined
The place of the damned -I'll tell you my mind.
...

We must suffer, husband and father, we must suffer, daughter and son,
For the wrong we have taken part in and the wrong that we have seen done.
Let the bride of frivolous fashion, and of ease, be ashamed and dumb,
For I tell you the nations shall rule us who have let their children come!
...

La voyageuse qui traverse les Halles à la tombée de l'été
Marchait sur la pointe des pieds
Le désespoir roulait au ciel ses grands arums si beaux
Et dans le sac à main il y avait mon rêve ce flacon de sels
...

...

Tell me:
What came first
Easter or the egg?
Crucifixion
...

From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth:
...

I.

You're my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to;
...

They were young lovers, and seated at the table in the window;
where in Paris they'd be watching
the passers-by watching them...
but no.
...

She looked not unlike the anti-heroine
of her own novels
or was it the other way around?
mousey but together,
...

You're my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to;
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;
So here's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!
...

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,
...

Why not live in fool’s paradise?
Whether it is matter of merchandise?
Or be it a sensitive debate to publicize?
No restriction on view’s to exercise
...

O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
...

I Think Of You
(short words but thoroughly honest)

when I see dry leaves
...

Beloved, may your sleep be sound
That have found it where you fed.
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty paris when he found
...

"There where that ray touches the plain
And the shadows escape as if they really ran,
Warsaw stands, open from all sides,
A city not very old but quite famous.
...

You ask how much I love you
And then you ask once more
And so my love I'll tell you now
As I did once before.
...

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
...

When with a skilful hand Prometheus made
A statue that the human form displayed,
Pandora, his own work, to wed he chose,
And from those two the human race arose.
...

O cowards! There she is!
Pile out into the stations!
The sun with its fiery lungs blew clear
...

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
...

DEDICATION

Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
...

'Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings, --
But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.
...

'Twas Christmastide in Germany,
And in the year of 1850,
And in the city of Berlin, which is most beautiful to the eye;
A poor boy was heard calling out to passers-by.
...

Une fois, une seule, aimable et douce femme,
À mon bras votre bras poli
S'appuya (sur le fond ténébreux de mon âme
Ce souvenir n'est point pâli);
...

to the memory of my friend SI-YA-U,
whose head was cut off in Shanghai

A CLAIM
...

She smiles at the mirror, eyes blue as the sky
Dreaming of Paris and faraway places
Of people she’ll meet, their stories, their faces
Wishing that time would quickly go by
...

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom, and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
...

I have gret wonder, be this lighte,
How that I live, for day ne nighte
I may nat slepe wel nigh noght,
...

A MIDDLE-AGE INTERLUDE.

ROSA MUNDI; SEU, FULCITE ME FLORIBUS.
A CONCEIT OF MASTER GYSBRECHT,
...

In a wilderness of reasons
not to write, he wrote. Just wrote.
Each word was the belief
in the possibility of the next.
...

How shall a generation know its story
If it will know no other? When, among
The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur
Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,
...

Turn on again, that old, once new film of your life -
it's called the 'establishing shot'; and as it pans
across your once-favourite city, corny in the sunshine,
arty in the dusk and rain, the home to all your dreams,
...

Walk into a restaurant with chicken on my mind
Look at the menu I want roastbeaf and wine
A waitress comes up I order baked beans and bread
...

Here's the garden she walked across,
Arm in my arm, such a short while since:
Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss
Hinders the hinges and makes them wince!
...

The tower bell in the Tenth Street Church
Rang out nostalgia for the refugee
Who knew the source of bells by sound.
We liked it, but in ignorance.
...

A GREAT year and place;
A harsh, discordant, natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother's
heart closer than any yet.
...

Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi.
'O Cæsar, we who are about to die
...

The mouth of this man is a gaunt strong mouth.
The head of this man is a gaunt strong head.
...

...

I

Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam's palace, sword in hand, to sate
...

THE chiefs were set; the soldiers crown'd the
field:
To these the master of the seven-fold shield
Upstarted fierce: and kindled with disdain.
...

It is snowing and death bugs me
as stubborn as insomnia.
The fierce bubbles of chalk,
the little white lesions
...

Homes reach the stars, the sky's below,
The land in smoke to it is near.
Inside the big and happy Paris
Remains the secretive despair.
...

1
My voice rings out, this time, from Damascus
It rings out from the house of my mother and father
In Sham. The geography of my body changes.
...

The town was taken--whether he might yield
Himself or bastion, little matter'd now:
His stubborn valour was no future shield.
Ismail's no more! The Crescent's silver bow
...

That sculptor we knew, the passionate-eyed son of a quarryman,
Who astonished Rome and Paris in his meteor youth, and then
...

Without a bed we now sleep sound
And take our meals upon the ground;
And though the blazing atmosphere
Must dreadful to the eye appear,
...

PRIAM, to whom the story was unknown,
As dead, deplor'd his metamorphos'd son:
A cenotaph his name, and title kept,
And Hector round the tomb, with all his brothers,
...

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt;
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.
...

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing
...

APHRODITE – GREEK GODDESS
OF LOVE AND BEAUTY!

Hesoid the Greek poet, lived in the latter part of
...

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!
...

The Lord, we look to once for all,
Is the Lord we should look at, all at once:
He knows not to vary, saith Saint Paul,
Nor the shadow of turning, for the nonce.
See him no other than as he is!
Give both the infinitudes their due---
...

I
Mets-toi sur ton séant, lève tes yeux, dérange
Ce drap glacé qui fait des plis sur ton front d'ange,
...

If you danced from midnight
to six A.M. who would understand?
...

The line
that remained, that
became true: . . . your
house in Paris -- become
...

Enfant, on vous dira plus tard que le grand-père
Vous adorait; qu'il fit de son mieux sur la terre,
...

We are dwarf birches.
We sit firmly, like splinters,
under the nails of frosts
...

Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?
...

I might!--unhappy word--O me, I might,
And then would not, or could not, see my bliss;
Till now wrapt in a most infernal night,
I find how heav'nly day, wretch! I did miss.
...

My Polish blood stirs me
But I was born in France
Paris now calling me
Singers singing to me
...

A purple blot against the dead white door
In my friend's rooms, bathed in their vile pink light,
I had not noticed her before
She snatched my eyes and threw them back to me:
...

The assembly now broke up and the people went their ways each to his
own ship. There they made ready their supper, and then bethought
them of the blessed boon of sleep; but Achilles still wept for
thinking of his dear comrade, and sleep, before whom all things bow,
...

Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
...