All poetry Collection

Mother Parrot`s advice to her children

Never get up till the sun gets up,
Or the mists will give you a cold,
And a parrot whose lungs have once been touched
Will never live to be old

Never eat plums that are not quite ripe,
For perhaps they will give you a pain;
And never dispute what the hornbill say,
Or you`ll never dispute again.

Never despise the

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After The Rain [for W. D. Snodgrass]

The barbed-wire fences rust
As their cedar uprights blacken
After a night of rain.
Some early, innocent lust
Gets me outdoors to smell
The teasle, the pelted bracken,
The cold, mossed-over well,
Rank with its iron chain,
And takes me off for a stroll.
Wetness has taken over.
From drain and creeper twine
It’s runnelled and trenched and edged
A

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A Song

Heigho for a glass, heigho for a lass,
A drink and a kiss, I leave you;
Heigho for a friend that sticks till the end —
Good-bye, my lass, don’t you grieve you.

Hurrah for a song that is not too long,
With a jolly roaring chorus,
While our cans beat time to the ringing rhyme
Till the ceiling cracks up

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From An Old Home

Wrote a mother to her child:
Why do you say, I don’t understand,
I’ve brought you all way braving,
The scorching sun and blistering sand.

I have heard your heartbeats,
When none could see you in me,
I have felt your heartbeats,
Whenever you have felt lonely.

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The City in the Sea

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath

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Isabella or The Pot of Basil

A Story from Boccaccio

I.

FAIR Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each

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Lapobo

Lapobo,
Tall but not too tall,
Short but not too short,
She is of medium size.

Lapobo,
Her teeth are not as ash
Nor the colour of maize flour,
Her teeth are white as fresh milk.
The whiteness of her teeth
When I think of her
Makes food drop from my hand.

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Negro Lullaby

Mammy’s baby, go ter sleep,
Hush-er-by, hush-er-by, my honey;
Cross de hyarf de cricket creep,
Hush-er-by, hush-er-by, my honey.
Hoot owl callin’ f’um de ol’ sycamo’
‘Way down yon’er in de holler;
While de whip-po’-will an’ de li’l’ screech owl
Dey des try dey bes’ ter foller.

Hush-er-by, hush-er-by, hush-er-by, my deah,
Hush-er-by, hush-er-by, my honey;
Shet yo’ eyes an’ drap

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The Bait

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.

There will the river whispering run
Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the sun;
And there the ‘enamour’d fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each

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The Leopard

She feels the shape of another animal
three trees ahead & raises her left front paw.
Dew trembles on each blade of grass
as a snake uncoils among the leaves.
She’s a goddess in a world mastered
by repetition & unearthly cadence,
pacing off light hidden in darkness.
She eases down her right paw,
slow as coming to an answer<br

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Song of the poor man

Give me a chair
and let me sit in in your midist
and praise poverty
and want.

The face of poor man
stays all crumpled up
by reason of the hunger and thirst
which are in is stomach.

A poor man knows not
how to eat with a rich man.
When he starts eating fish
he eat is head.

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Answer

I broke at last
the terror-fringed fascination
that bound my ancient gaze
to those crowding faces
of plunder and seized my
remnant life in a miracle
of decision between white-
collar hands and shook it
like a cheap watch in
my ear and threw it down
beside me on the earth floor
and rose to my feet. I
made of

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Reincarnation

The clanging fire-bells shook the air,
The maddened crowd roared like the sea
And hurled its human waves ‘gainst me —
Then through the smoke a face gleamed fair
A moment brief — and then the crash
As chariot wheels together dash;
Mad horses rear and plunge and scream —
It all comes back, an old, old dream,
The brutal

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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
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen

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Fish Fossil

With such agility in your movements,
Such buoyancy in your strength,
You leapt in the foam
And swam in the sea.

Unfortunately, a volcano’s eruption
Or perhaps an earthquake
Cost you your freedom
And buried you in the silt.

After millions of years
Members of a geological team
Found you in a layer of rock
And you still look alive.

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Night

Your hand is heavy, Night, upon my brow.
I bear no heart mercuric like the clouds,
to dare.
Exacerbation from your subtle plough.
Woman as a clam, on the sea’s cresent.
I saw your jealous eye quench the sea’s
Flouorescence, dance on the pulse incessant
Of the waves. And I stood, drained
Submitting like the sands, blood and brine
Coursing

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Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be

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Take me home

Take me home
Where your elders
Can see our love

Stash me not away from the sky
Where your elders we say
I am not a highbrow suitor

As my elders
Known everything
About our relationship

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Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

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