Category Archives: poetry

Dream Barker

by Jean Valentine We met for supper in your flat-bottomed boat.I got there first: in a white dress: I rememberWondering if you’d come. Then you shot over the bank,A Virgilian Nigger Jim, and poled us offTo a little sea-food barker’s cave you knew.What’ll you have? you said. Eaves hung down,Bamboozled claws hung up from theContinue reading “Dream Barker”

January

by John Updike The days are shortThe sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and darkFat snowy footstepsTrack the floorMilk bottles burstOutside the door.The river isA frozen placeHeld still beneathThe trees of lace.The sky is lowThe wind is gray.The radiatorPurrs all day.

Houses of Dreams

by Sarah Teasdale You took my empty dreamsAnd filled them every oneWith tenderness and nobleness,April and the sun.The old empty dreamsWhere my thoughts would throngAre all too full of happinessTo even hold a song.Oh, the empty dreams were dimAnd the empty dreams were wide,They were sweet and shadowy housesWhere my thoughts could hide.But you tookContinue reading “Houses of Dreams”

All the World’s a Stage

by William Shakespeare All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his life plays many parts,His acts being seven stages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like aContinue reading “All the World’s a Stage”

A Birthday

by Christina Rossetti My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a water’d shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all theseBecause my love has come to me.Raise me a dais of silkContinue reading “A Birthday”

Street in Agrigentum

by Salvatore Quasimodo There is still the wind that I rememberfiring the manes of horses, racingslanting, across the plains,the wind that stains and scours the sandstone,and the heart of gloomy columns, telamons,Overthrown in the grass. Spirit of the ancients, greywith the rancour, return on the wind,breathe in that feather-light mossthat covers those giants, hurled downContinue reading “Street in Agrigentum”

“I loved you…”

by Alexander Pushkin I loved you, and probably still do,And for a while the feeling may remain…But let my love no longer trouble you,I do not wish to cause you any pain.I loved you, and the hopelessness I knew,The jealousy, the shyness – though in vain -Made up a love so tender and so trueAsContinue reading ““I loved you…””

The Send-off

by Wilfred Owen Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their wayTo the siding-shed,And lined the train with faces grimly gay.Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and sprayAs men’s are, dead.Dull porters watch them, and a casual trampStood staring hard,Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lampWinkedContinue reading “The Send-off”