Poetry

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Adrienne Rich    wrote    Equinox "Time split like a fruit between dark and light and a usual fog drags over this landfall"

Adrienne Rich    wrote    The School Among the Ruins "Teaching the first lesson and the last-great falling light of summer"

Adrienne Rich    wrote    Seven Skins "Walk along back of the library in 1952"

Adrienne Rich    wrote    This Evening Let's "...not talk about my country How I'm from an optimistic culture"

A. E. Housman    wrote    When I Was One and Twenty "...I heard a wise man say, 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas but not your heart away'"

Alexander Kuo    wrote    If Death Became a Thing Like That "If staring at the negative of a black and white photograph of my dead grandparents"

Alfred Lord Tennyson    wrote    Bugle Song "The splendor falls on castle walls and snowy summits old"

Alfred Lord Tennyson    wrote    The Charge of the Light Brigade "Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred …"

Alfred Lord Tennyson    wrote    Crossing the Bar "Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me!"

Alfred Lord Tennyson    wrote    The Lady of Shalott "On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye …"

Alfred Lord Tennyson    wrote    Ulysses "It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags …"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    America "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing America two dollars and twenty seven cents January 17, 1956"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    Bixby Canyon "Path crowded with thistle fern blue daisy, glassy grass, pale morninglory scattered on a granite hill"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    Death to Van Gogh's Ear! Poet is Priest Money has reckoned the soul of America"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    Howl "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    A Supermarket in California "What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman"

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    To a Dead Poet "Some breath breathes out Adonais and Atlantis" -- for Pablo Neruda

Allen Ginsberg    wrote    Wichita Vortex Sutra "I lift my voice aloud, make Mantra of American language now, pronounce the words beginning my own millennium"

Anita Endrezze Probst    wrote    Manifest Destiny "Feathers blacken against the sun, rising like the songs of old warriors"

Anne Sexton    wrote    Courage "It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake"

Anne Sexton    wrote    Mothers "Oh mother, here in your lap, as good as a bowlful of clouds"

Anne Sexton    wrote    The Rowing Endeth "I'm mooring my rowboat at the dock of the island called God"

Anne Sexton    wrote    Welcome Morning "There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Canon towel, newly washed"

Anselm Hollo    wrote    Message "hello! i am one of your molecules! i started out from crab nebula"

Anselm Hollo    wrote    Old Space Cadet Speaking "let me tell you, the captain knew exactly what he would do"

Anselm Hollo    wrote    Song of the Tusk "the elephant bogged down thousands of years ago"

Banjo Paterson    wrote    The Man from Snowy River "There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around That the colt from old Regret had got away …"

Bartolo Cattafi    wrote    Departure from Greenwich "You always leave from Greenwich, from the zero marked on every map"

Bartolo Cattafi    wrote    Helmsman "Then I went to him and said, If you please turn to the right that is the heart's archipelago"

Bartolo Cattafi    wrote    Magic Spell "I don't know where he comes from. He crossed the circumference at one point and set up his tents nearby"

Bill Holm    wrote    The Icelandic Language "In this language, no industrial revolution, no pasteurized milk, no oxygen, no telephone"

Billy Collins    wrote    Dharma "The way the dog trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella"

Billy Collins    wrote    Nightclub "Your are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you is a theme that keeps coming up"

Billy Collins    wrote    Passengers "At the gate. I sit in a row of blue seats with the possible company of my death"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    Chicago "Hog butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    The Junk Man "I am glad God saw Death and gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired of living"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    Languages "There are no handles upon a language whereby men take hold of it and mark it with signs for its remembrance"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    Our Prayer of Thanks "For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    The Road and the End "I shall foot it down the roadway in the dusk"

Carl Sandburg    wrote    To a Dead Man "Over the dead line we have called to you to come across with a word for us"

Charles Baudelaire    wrote    Enivrez-Vous "One should always be drunk. That's all there is to it"

Charles Bukowski    wrote    The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills "the phone rings and it is usually the woman with the sexy voice from the phone company"

Charles Bukowski    wrote    Dostoevsky "against the wall the firing squad ready. then he got a reprieve. suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?"

Charles Bukowski    wrote    The Great One "down at the end of the bar he used to bum drinks, now he is a balding man"

Charles Bukowski    wrote    The Last Song "...only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never...."

Charles Bukowski    wrote    The Poetry Reading "at high noon at a small college near the beach, sober"

Charles Bukowski    wrote    To Hell With Robert Schumann "I finished my drink and went upstairs to hear the second half"

Charles Reznikoff    wrote    Heart and Clock "the clocks drip in every room-our lives are leaking from the places"

Charles Reznikoff    wrote    Holocaust Poem consists of testimony of survivors

Charles Reznikoff    wrote    New Year's "The solid houses in the mist are thin as tissue paper"

Charles Reznikoff    wrote    Te Deum Objectivist poet, 1894-1976; "Not because of victories I sing, having none"

Charles Simic    wrote    Stone "Go inside a stone. That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove"

Charles Simic    wrote    Summer Morning "I love to stay in bed all morning, covers thrown off, naked, eyes closed, listening"

Charles Simic    wrote    The White Room "The obvious is difficult to prove. Many prefer the hidden"

Ch'en Yu I    wrote    Travelling in Hsiang County "Flying flowers from both shores glow red on our boat"

Ch'in Kuan    wrote    Composed in a Dream "Drunk, lying in the shade of the old rattan blinds, I can't tell North from South" -- 1048-1100

Conrad Hilberry    wrote    Blind Girl on the Santa Fe "Not diverted by this windowful of cows or the distant tractor like a pen stroke"

Dante    wrote    The Divine Comedy Widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature

David Ignatow    wrote    Kaddish "Whisper to the rock, I found you, whisper to the earth, Mother, I have found her, and I am safe and always have been"

David Ignatow    wrote    The Story of Progress "The apple I held and bit into was for me. The friend who spoke to me was for me"

David R. Slavitt    wrote    Titanic "The cold water is anaesthetic and very quick. The cries on all sides must be a comfort. We all go: only a few, first class"

Denise Levertov    wrote    Come Into Animal Presence "...no man is so guileless as the serpent. The lonely white rabbit on the roof is a star"

Dan Gerber    wrote    My Father's Fields "They looked like blackbirds, my father said, that first burst of shrapnel"

Dan Gerber    wrote    The Tragedy of Action "Tomorrow afternoon we will carry these books to the basement"

D. H. Lawrence    wrote    Piano "Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me, taking me back down the vista of years"

Diane Wakoski    wrote    When Breakfast is Brought By the Morning Star "...she is imagining that she is writing in a book with white pages"

Donald Hall    wrote    Eleanor's Letters "I who picked up the neat old letters never knew the last names to complete"

Donald Hall    wrote    Kicking the Leaves "...October, as we walk home together from the game, in Ann Arbor"

Donald Hall    wrote    The Man in the Dead Machine "High on a slope in New Guinea the Grumann Hellcat lodges among bright vines"

Donald Hall    wrote    Ox Cart Man "In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field"

Donald Hall    wrote    Smile "She was twenty-five when they settled in our town"

Donald Hall    wrote    The Town of Hill "Back of the dam, under a flat pad of water, church bells ring"

Donald Hall    wrote    White Apples "When my father had been dead a week I woke with his voice in my ear"

Donald Justice    wrote    The Assassination "It begins again, the nocturnal pulse. It courses through the cables laid for it" -- June 5, 1968

Donald Justice    wrote    Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens "Hartford is cold today but no colder for your absence"

Donald Justice    wrote    Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M. "Excepting the diner on the outskirts the town of Ladora at 3 a.m. was dark"

Donald Justice    wrote    The Pupil "Picture me, the shy pupil at the door, one small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny"

Donald Justice    wrote    Variations on a Text by Vallejo "I will die in Miami in the sun, on a day when the sun is very bright"

Dorothea Mackellar    wrote    I Love a Sunburnt Country "I love a sunburnt country a land of sweeping plains ..."

Dr. John McCrae    wrote    In Flanders Fields "In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place …"

Dylan Thomas    wrote    Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night "Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light …"

Dylan Thomas    wrote    Especially When the October Wind "...with frosty fingers punishes my hair, caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire"

Dylan Thomas    wrote    Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines "...where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides"

Edgar A. Guest    wrote    Success "I hold no dream of fortunes vast, nor seek undying fame"

Edgar Allan Poe    wrote    Annabel Lee "it was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea"

Edgar Allan Poe    wrote    A Dream Within a Dream "Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow …"

Edgar Allan Poe    wrote    The Raven "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …"

Edna St. Vincent Millay    wrote    Dirge Without Music "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground"

Edna St. Vincent Millay    wrote    Sonnet XLIII "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten"

Edward Dorn    wrote    The Air of June Sings "Quietly and while at rest on the trim grass I have gazed"

Edward Dorn    wrote    The Contract "The Middle West supplies the margins in return for an atrophication"

Edward Dorn    wrote    Executioner. Stay Thy Cold Blade "As knowledge grows it becomes apparent that the brain is a machine"

Edward Dorn    wrote    Gunslinger An epic (or anti-epic) poem in four volumes; "The curtain might rise anywhere on a single speaker...I met in Mesilla the Cautious Gunslinger"

Edward Dorn    wrote    The Octopus Thinks With Its Arms "Out of the total of some 500 million nerve-cells 300 million or more are in the arms"

E. E. Cummings    wrote    The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls "...are beautiful and have comfortable minds"

E. E. Cummings    wrote    I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big "...whose warmest heart recoiled at war"

E. E. Cummings    wrote    May I Feel Said He I'll squeal said she...

E. E. Cummings    wrote    Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand "...(which comes carefully out of Nowhere) arranging a window"

E. E. Cummings    wrote    YgUDuh "ydoan...yunnuhstan...ydoan o...yunnuhstand dem...yguduh ged..." And so on.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning    wrote    How Do I Love Thee? "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height …"

Elizabeth Bishop    wrote    Manners For a Child of 1918 "My grandfather said to me as we sat on the wagon seat"

Emily Dickinson    wrote    Her Face Was in a Bed of Hair "...like flowers in a plot"

Emily Dickinson    wrote    I Years Had Been From Home "I Years had been from Home And now before the Door I dared not enter, lest a Face I never saw before Stare solid into mine And ask my Business there …"

Emily Dickinson    wrote    There is Another Sky "There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there …"

Erica Jong    wrote    Parable of the Four-Poster "Because she wants to touch him she moves away"

Ernest Lawrence Thayer    wrote    Casey at the Bat "It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day; The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play. …"

Ezra Pound    wrote    The Cantos "And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth of the godly sea"

Ezra Pound    wrote    A Girl "The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast--

Federico Garcia Lorca    wrote    Gacela of the Dark Death "I want to sleep the sleep of the apples"; trans. by Robery Bly

Frank O'Hara    wrote    Animals "Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    After Making Love We Hear Footsteps "For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    The Bear "In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    Blackberry Eating "I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, blackberries"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    Fergus Falling "He climbed to the top of one of those million white pines"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    The Fly "The fly I've just brushed from my face keeps buzzing about me, flesh-eater starved for the soul"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    How Many Nights "...have I lain in terror, O Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    The Porcupine "Fatted on herbs, swollen on crabapples, puffed up on bast and phloem"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    The Sadness of Brothers "He comes to me like a mouth speaking from under several inches of water"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    St Francis and the Sow "The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower"

Galway Kinnell    wrote    Why Regret? Didn't you like the way the ants help the peony globes open by eating off the glue?"

Gary Snyder    wrote    Burned Out "An ancient cedar stump to burn against which piled the limbs of gnarly wolf-tree pine"

Gary Snyder    wrote    For Alan Watts "He blazed out a new path for us"; on his death

Gary Snyder    wrote    Hay for the Horses "He had driven half the night from far down San Joaquin"

Gary Snyder    wrote    Journeys "Genji caught a grey bird, fluttering"

Gary Snyder    wrote    This Poem is for Bear "A bear down under the cliff. She is eating huckleberries. They are ripe now"

Gary Snyder    wrote    We Make Our Vows Together With All Beings "Eating a sandwich at work in the woods, as a doe nibbles buckbrush in snow"

Gary Snyder    wrote    The Years "The years seem to tumble faster and faster I work harder the boys get larger planting apples and cherry"

George Oppen    wrote    Of Being Numerous "There are things we live among and to see them is to know ourselves"

Guillaume Apollinaire    wrote    Le Pont Mirabeau "Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine et nos amours"

Guillaume Apollinaire    wrote    There Is "...this ship which has taken my beloved back again"- trans. by Michael Benedikt

Hart Crane    wrote    At Melville's Tomb "Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge, the dice of drowned men's bones"

Hayden Carruth    wrote    Because I Am For Sidney Bechet, 1897-1959

Hayden Carruth    wrote    The Fantastic Names of Jazz "Zoot Sims, Joshua Redman, Billie Holiday, Pete Fountain"

Hayden Carruth    wrote    Forty-Five "When I was forty-five I lay for hours beside a pool, the green hazy springtime water"

Hayden Carruth    wrote    Journey to a Known Place Long poem beginning, "Tundra, the distant marches, and wind veering, clatter of steely grasses"

Hayden Carruth    wrote    Memory "A woman I used to know well died a week ago"

Henry Lawson    wrote    After All "The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from the bush and town; My spirit revives in the morning breeze …"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow    wrote    The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere "Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere …"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow    wrote    My Lost Youth "Often I think of the beautiful town that is seated by the sea"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow    wrote    The Village Blacksmith "Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands …"

Hermann Hesse    wrote    Sometimes "...when a bird cries out, or the wind sweeps through a tree"

Homer    wrote    The Iliad

Homer    wrote    The Odyssey This Greek epic poem is a sequel to the "Iliad" about hero Odysseus' return to Ithaca

Howard Moss    wrote    The Persistence of Song "Although it is not yet evening, the secretaries have changed their frocks as if it were time for dancing"

Howard Nemerov    wrote    Vermeer "Taking what is, and seeing it as it is, pretending no heroic stances or gestures"

Jack Kerouac    wrote    Mexico City Blues In 242 choruses

Jack Kerouac    wrote    Rimbaud "Arthur! On t'appela pas Jean!"

Jack Kerouac    wrote    Some Western Haikus "Missing a kick at the icebox door, it closed anyway"

Jacques Prévert    wrote    Déjeuner Du Matin Recently voted by the French people the most popular French poet of all time: "Il a mis le café dans la tasse"

James K. Baxter    wrote    The Eagle "Were it the parrot brazen and metallic cawing Were it the brilliant focussed eyes of water fowl …"

James Tipton    wrote    America: The Elephant "1824 Old Bet, bought by a Somers man, went mad in Western Connecticut"

James Welch    wrote    In My First Hard Springtime "Those red men you offended were my brothers. Town drinkers, Buckles Pipe, Star Boy"

James Welch    wrote    The Man from Washington "The end came easy for most of us. Packed away in our crude beginnings in some far corner of a flat world"

James Wright    wrote    Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio "In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville"

James Wright    wrote    Beginning "The moon drops one or two feathers into the fields"

James Wright    wrote    A Blessing "Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass"

James Wright    wrote    Milkweed "While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself"

James Wright    wrote    The Minneapolis Poem "I wonder how many old men last winter hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled"

James Wright    wrote    On the Skeleton of a Hound "Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float tendril and string against the crumbling wall"

James Wright    wrote    Saint Judas "When I went out to kill myself, I caught a pack of hoodlums beating up a man"

James Wright    wrote    To a Blossoming Pear Tree "Beautiful natural blossoms, pure delicate body, you stand without trembling"

Jane Kenyon    wrote    Let Evening Come "Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come"

Jane Kenyon    wrote    Twilight: After Haying "The last sweet exhalations of timothy and vetch go out with the song of the bird, the ravaged field grows wet with dew"

Jim Harrison    wrote    After Reading Takahashi "Nothing is the same to anyone. Moscow is east of Nairobi"

Jim Harrison    wrote    Counting Birds "As a child, fresh out of the hospital with tape covering the left side of my face"

Jim Harrison    wrote    February Swans "heads looped low and tucked to the wind; looking for fish in the deep greenness of water"

Jim Harrison    wrote    Natural World "The earth is almost round. The seas are curved and hug the earth"

Jim Harrison    wrote    Word Drunk "I think of the twenty thousand poems of Li Po and wonder"

John Berryman    wrote    Address to the Lord "Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, inimitable contriver"

John Keats    wrote    Ode to a Grecian Urn "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, thou foster-child of silence and slow time"

John Keats    wrote    Ode to a Nightingale "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains …"

John Keats    wrote    To Autumn "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun"

John Updike    wrote    Dog's Death "She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car"

John Updike    wrote    Perfection Wasted "And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic"

Jorge Luis Borges    wrote    The Enigmas "I who am singing these lines today will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse"; trans. John Updike

Joyce Kilmer    wrote    Trees "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree."

Juan Ramón Jiménez    wrote    The Lamb Was Bleating Softly "...The young jackass grew happier with his excited bray."; translation by Robert Bly

Kenneth Patchen    wrote    The Grand Palace of Versailles "An elephant made of pink cotton ...Towers of lace under which satin-heeled Gentlemen sit"

Kenneth Patchen    wrote    Lunch Wagon on Highway 57 "The big lad with too much face and a voice fuzzed like a slice of grand larceny, pointed his fork"

Kenneth Patchen    wrote    The State of the Nation "Understand that they were sitting just inside the door at a little table with two full beers and two empties"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    Another Spring "The seasons revolve and the years change with no assistance or supervision"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    The Dragon and the Unicorn " 'And what is love?' said Pilate, and washed his hands"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    The Family "Late night coming back to Melbourne from a party on the Kangaroo Plains"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    The Heart's Garden Long poem beginning, "Young rice plants are just being transplanted"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    Now the Starlit Moonless Spring "...night stands over the Fountaine De Medicis"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    The Phoenix and the Tortoise "Webs of misery spread in the brain, in the Spring in the soft heat"

Kenneth Rexroth    wrote    The Signature of All Things My head and shoulders, and my book in the cool shade"

Langston Hughes    wrote    Let America Be America Again "Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain seeking a home where he himself is free."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti    wrote    A Buddha in the Woodpile "If there had been only one Buddhist in the woodpile in Waco, Texas"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti    wrote    Christ Climbed Down "...from His bare Tree this year"

Leslie Silko    wrote    Prayer to the Pacific "I traveled to the ocean distant from my southwest land of sandrock"

Leslie Silko    wrote    Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story "In the wintertime at night we tell coyote stories" -- for Simon Ortiz

Linda Pastan    wrote    The Answering Machine "I call and hear your voice on the answering machine weeks after your death"

Linda Pastan    wrote    Bess "When Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter, waited for her highwayman"

Linda Pastan    wrote    Death of a Potter "When her wheel suddenly stopped turning, a round world was stilled on its axis"

Linda Pastan    wrote    Departures "They seemed to all take off at once: Aunt Grace whose kidneys closed shop; cousin Rose"

Linda Pastan    wrote    The Last Uncle "The last uncle is pushing off in his funeral skiff (the usual black limo)"

Lord Byron    wrote    She Walks in Beauty Like the Night "SHE walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies …"

Louis MacNeice    wrote    The British Museum Reading Room "Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers go up and down the alleys"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    Disturbed Earth "...some plants sprout quickly in it. Sow thistles come to mind"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    The Door "The door swings open, you look in. It's dark in there"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    One Day You Will Reach... "...a bend in your life, time will curve like a wind"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    Reindeer Moss on Granite "This is a tiny language, smaller than Gallic; when you have your boots on"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    The Third Age Visits the Arctic "They like it when you visit them, says Aaju. Just say hello"

Margaret Atwood    wrote    War Photo "The dead woman thrown down on the dusty road is very beautiful"

Marge Piercy    wrote    Digging In "This fall you will taste carrots that you planted, you thinned, you mulched, you watered"

Marge Piercy    wrote    To Be of Use "The people I love best jump into work first without dallying in the shallows"

Mary Fyre    wrote    Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep "Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep …"

Matthew Arnold    wrote    Dover Beach "The sea is calm to-night, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits"

Maxine Kumin    wrote    Family Reunion "The week in August you come home, adult, professional, aloof, we roast and carve the fatted calf"

Maya Angelou    wrote    Phenomenal Woman "Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies.

May Sarton    wrote    August Third "These days lifting myself up like a heavy weight, old camel getting to her knees"

May Sarton    wrote    Death and the Turtle "Who will remember you when I am gone, my darling ones, or who remember me?"

Mei Mei Berssenbrugge    wrote    Abortion "When we walked outside at sunset a tenement was burning to the ground"

Michael McClure    wrote    The List "OLD MEN SLEEPING IN CARS, a hawk on a boulder dripping with fog, ten deer"

Muriel Rukeyser    wrote    Neruda, The Wine "We are the seas through whom the great fish passed and passes"

N. Scott Momaday    wrote    Carriers of the Dream Wheel "This is the Wheel of Dreams which is carried on their voices"

N. Scott Momaday    wrote    The Gourd Dancer "Another season centers on this place. Like memory the blood congeals in it"

Octavio Paz    wrote    Sunstone "un sauce de cristal, un chopo de agua, un alto surtidor que el viento arquea"

Pablo Neruda    wrote    Enigmas "...and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind"; translation by Robert Bly

Pablo Neruda    wrote    If You Forget Me "I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window …"

Pablo Neruda    wrote    Nothing But Death "There are cemetaries that are lonely, graves full of bones that do not make a sound"; trans. by Robert Bly

Paul Bowles    wrote    Blessed Are the Meek "Blessed be God and I Blessed be all his angels and all my thoughts"

Paul Bowles    wrote    Here I Am "When I am here I shall not mind I shall merely murmur"

Paul Bowles    wrote    Sidi Amar in Winter "But I think I have never seen your face A rainy day, when the sky's grey arteries pulse"

Percy Bysshe Shelley    wrote    Indian Serenade "I arise from dreams of thee in the first sweet sleep of night"

Percy Bysshe Shelley    wrote    Ozymandias "I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert …"

Rachel Field    wrote    Meeting "As I went home on the old wood road,. With my basket and lesson book …"

Rachel Field    wrote    Something Told the Wild Geese "Something told the wild geese It was time to go …"

Rainer Maria Rilke    wrote    Leda "When the god, needing something, decided to become a swan"; trans by Robert Bly

Ralph Waldo Emerson    wrote    Terminus "It is now time to be old, to take in the sail"

Randall Jarrell    wrote    Bats "A bat is born naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail and catches him"

Ray Young Bear    wrote    Differences "coughing up blood before the sun rose. i spit out the wind"

Ray Young Bear    wrote    Trains Made of Stone "until that sun, which keeps asking for an answer, agrees to remain still"

Richard Brautigan    wrote    The Galilee Hitch-Hiker In 9 parts; "Baudelaire was driving a Model A across Galilee"

Richard Brautigan    wrote    Your Catfish Friend "If I were to live my life in catfish forms, in scaffolds of skin and whiskers"

Robert Bly    wrote    The Eel in the Cave "Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips porous to murder"

Robert Bly    wrote    For My Son, Noah, Ten Years Old "Night and day arrive, and day after day goes by, and what is old remains old"

Robert Bly    wrote    November Day at McClure's "Alone on the jagged rock at the south end of McClure's beach"

Robert Bly    wrote    Snowbanks North of the House "Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house"

Robert Bly    wrote    When My Dead Father Called "Last night I dreamt my father called to us. He was stuck somewhere"

Robert Burns    wrote    Comin Thro' the Rye "...poor body, comin thro' the rye, she draigl't her petticoatie comin thro' the rye."

Robert Burns    wrote    A Red, Red Rose "O my luve's like a red, red rose, that's newly sprung in June …"

Robert Burns    wrote    To a Louse "Ha! Whare ye gaun, ye crawlin' ferlie?"

Robert Burns    wrote    To a Mouse "Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie!"

Robert Creeley    wrote    The Moon "Earlier in the evening the moon was clear to the east"

Robert Duncan    wrote    Night Scenes "The moon's up-riding makes a line flowing out into lion's mane of traffic"

Robert Duncan    wrote    Roots and Branches "Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling"

Robert Francis    wrote    Waxwings "Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings chat on a February berrybush"

Robert Frost    wrote    Acquainted With the Night "I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light..."

Robert Frost    wrote    After Apple-Picking "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree, Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill …"

Robert Frost    wrote    Birches "When I see birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter dark trees"

Robert Frost    wrote    Fire and Ice " Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice …"

Robert Frost    wrote    The Investment "Over back where they speak of life as staying ('You couldn't call it a living, for it ain't')"

Robert Frost    wrote    The Road Not Taken "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood …"

Robert Frost    wrote    Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening "Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though …"

Robert Louis Stevenson    wrote    I Will Make You Brooches "...and toys for your delight of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night"

Robert Service    wrote    The Shooting of Dan McGrew "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon"

Robert Vas Dias    wrote    Petoskey Stone "On the lake-bottom near the shore it appears to move among others"

Robinson Jeffers    wrote    Animals "At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore in the slow swell between the rock and the cliff"

Robinson Jeffers    wrote    Continent's End "At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring"

Robinson Jeffers    wrote    Shakespeare's Grave "Oh, a thousand years will hardly leach, he thought, this dust of that fire"

Robinson Jeffers    wrote    Shine, Perishing Republic "While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire"

Rudyard Kipling    wrote    Gunga Din "You may talk o' gin and beer when you're quartered safe out 'ere"

Rudyard Kipling    wrote    If "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …"

Rudyard Kipling    wrote    Mandalay "By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea"

Rupert Brooke    wrote    The Soldier "If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge    wrote    Kubla Khan "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree …"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge    wrote    Rime of the Ancient Mariner "It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. `By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?"

Sara Teasdale    wrote    Those Who Love "...the most, do not talk of their love Francesca, Guinevere, Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise"

Sharon Olds    wrote    Bible Study: 71 B.C.E. "After Marcus Licinius Crassus defeated the army of Spartacus, he crucified 6000 men"

Sharon Olds    wrote    The Connoisseuse of Slugs "When I was a connoisseuse of slugs I would part the ivy leaves"

Sharon Olds    wrote    First Hour "That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged my mother slowly off"

Sharon Olds    wrote    I Go Back to May 1937 "I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out"

Sharon Olds    wrote    Miscarriage "When I was a month pregnant, the great clots of blood appeared in the pale green swaying water of the toilet"

Sharon Olds    wrote    Take the I Out "But I love the I, steel I beam that my father sold"

Sharon Olds    wrote    Virginal Orgy "In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat, a Senior, Captain of the high school team"

Sharon Olds    wrote    What It Meant "I didn't know what it meant, that he was born in the beauty of the lillies"

Shel Silverstein    wrote    Where the Sidewalk Ends "There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins …"

Shinkichi Takahashi    wrote    Fish "I hold a newspaper, reading. Suddenly my hands become cow ears"; trans. by Lucien Stryk

Shinkichi Takahashi    wrote    Sparrow in Winter "Breastdown fluttering in the breeze, the sparrow's full of air holes"

Simon Ortiz    wrote    The Creation: According to Coyote "First of all, it's all true. Coyote, he says this"

Simon Ortiz    wrote    The Serenity in Stones "I am holding this turquoise in my hands. My hands hold the sky"

Stanley Kunitz    wrote    The Portrait "My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time"

Sylvia Plath    wrote    Frog Autumn "Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother, The insects are scant, skinny …"

Ted Kooser    wrote    Old Cemetery Somebody has been here today to cut the grass, coming and going unseen"

Ted Kooser    wrote    Tectonics "In only a few months there begin to be fissures in what we remember"

Tess Gallagher    wrote    I Stop Writing the Poem "to fold the clothes. No matter who lives or who dies, I'm still a woman"

Theodore Enslin    wrote    Forms Four-volume long poem

Thomas Gray    wrote    Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard "The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea …"

Thomas Merton    wrote    There Has to Be a Jail for Ladies "...when they are poor, without nice things, and with their hair down"

Thomas Moore    wrote    Venetian Air "Row gently here, my gondolier, so softly wake the tide, that not an ear on earth may hear, but hers to whom we glide"

Tomas Tranströmer    wrote    Schubertiana "Outside New York, a high place where with one glance"; trans. by Robert Bly

Tom Clark    wrote    The Great One "So long Roberto Clemente, you have joined the immortals"

Tom Clark    wrote    To Clemente in September "Watching the season die on television makes me think of you, Roberto, in the end"

T. S. Eliot    wrote    The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky"

T. S. Eliot    wrote    The Waste Land "April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire"

Wallace Stevens    wrote    On the Road Home "It was when I said, 'There is no such thing as the truth,' that the grapes seemed fatter."

Wallace Stevens    wrote    The Snow Man "One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow"

Wallace Stevens    wrote    Study of Two Pears "Opusculum paedagogum. The pears are not viols, nudes or bottles"

Walter De La Mare    wrote    The Listeners "Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door …"

Walt Whitman    wrote    Beat! Beat! Drums! "Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force …"

Walt Whitman    wrote    Come Up From the Fields Father "...here's a letter from our Pete, and come to the front door mother, here's a letter from thy dear son"

Walt Whitman    wrote    O Captain, My Captain "O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won …"

Walt Whitman    wrote    Song of Myself His singular long poem

Walt Whitman    wrote    When I Heard at the Close of Day "...how many names had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol"

Walt Whitman    wrote    When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer "When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me"

Walt Whitman    wrote    When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd "...And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night"

W. D. Snodgrass    wrote    Autumn Scene "In the public gardens they are walking. The skies appear correct and glum"

W. D. Snodgrass    wrote    The First Leaf "The train pulls down the track. We go about our business; I have turned my back"

W. D. Snodgrass    wrote    Powwow "They all dance with their eyes turned inward- like a woman nursing a sick child she already knows will die"

W. D. Snodgrass    wrote    September "The newts in the creek had gone already. I don't know where. I can't remember your face or anything you said"

Wendell Berry    wrote    Her First Calf "Her fate seizes her and brings her down. She is heavy with it"

Wendell Berry    wrote    Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front "Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay"

Wendell Berry    wrote    The Peace of Wild Things "When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Address to the Beasts "If you cannot engender a genius like Mozart, neither can you plague the earth with brilliant sillies like Hegel or clever nasties like Hobbes"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Archaeology "There's nothing the Crucified would like less than butchery to appease him"

W. H. Auden    wrote    At Last the Secret is Out "...as it always must come in the end, the delicious story is ripe to tell"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Aubade "Time, the domain of Deeds, calls for a complex Grammar with many Moods and Tenses"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Funeral Blues " Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone ..." Read by Matthew (John Hannah) at the funeral of his partner Gareth (Simon Callow) in the film 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'.

W. H. Auden    wrote    No, Plato, No "I can't imagine anything that I would like less to be than a disincarnate Spirit"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Ode to the Medieval Poets "Chaucer, Langland, Douglas, Dunbar, with all your brother Anons, how on earth did you ever manage"

W. H. Auden    wrote    Thank You, Fog "Grown used to New York weather, all too familiar with Smog"

William Blake    wrote    Holy Thursday " 'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, the children walking two and two, in red & blue & green"

William Blake    wrote    Jerusalem "And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green?"

William Blake    wrote    The Lamb "Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee...."