Telegram

Related poetry:

1. Ice Handler I KNOW an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with Pearl buttons the size of a dollar, And he lugs a hundred-pound hunk into a saloon ice- Box, helps himself to cold ham and rye bread, Tells the bartender it’s hotter than yesterday and will be Hotter yet to-morrow, by Jesus, And is on […]...
2. GENIAL IMPULSE THUS roll I, never taking ease, My tub, like Saint Diogenes, Now serious am, now seek to please; Now love and hate in turn one sees; The motives now are those, now these; Now nothings, now realities. Thus roll I, never taking ease, My tub, like Saint Diogenes. 1810....
3. Snow ‘Who affirms that crystals are alive?’ I affirm it, let who will deny: Crystals are engendered, wax and thrive, Wane and wither; I have seen them die. Trust me, masters, crystals have their day, Eager to attain the perfect norm, Lit with purpose, potent to display Facet, angle, colour, beauty, form. Water-crystals need for flower […]...
4. The Dandelion's pallid tube The Dandelion’s pallid tube Astonishes the Grass, And Winter instantly becomes An infinite Alas The tube uplifts a signal Bud And then a shouting Flower, The Proclamation of the Suns That sepulture is o’er....
5. Shelley's Skylark (The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March) Somewhere afield here something lies In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust That moved a poet to prophecies – A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust The dust of the lark that Shelley heard, And made immortal through times to be; – Though it only lived like another bird, And knew not its immortality. Lived its meek life; […]...
6. After Arguing Against The Contention That Art Must Come From Discontent Whispering to each handhold, “I’ll be back,” I go up the cliff in the dark. One place I loosen a rock and listen a long time Till it hits, faint in the gulf, but the rush Of the torrent almost drowns it out, and the wind I almost forgot the wind: it tears at your […]...
7. Repetitions THEY are crying salt tears Over the beautiful beloved body Of Inez Milholland, Because they are glad she lived, Because she loved open-armed, Throwing love for a cheap thing Belonging to everybody- Cheap as sunlight, And morning air....
8. On the desert On the desert A silence from the moon’s deepest valley. Fire rays fall athwart the robes Of hooded men, squat and dumb. Before them, a woman Moves to the blowing of shrill whistles And distant thunder of drums, While mystic things, sinuous, dull with terrible colour, Sleepily fondle her body Or move at her will, […]...
9. Mule Song Silver will lie where she lies Sun-out, whatever turning the world does, Longeared in her ashen, earless, Floating world: Indifferent to sores and greengage colic, Where oats need not Come to, Bleached by crystals of her trembling time: Beyond all brunt of seasons, blind Forever to all blinds, Inhabited by Brooks still she may wraith […]...
10. The Simple Truth I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, Took them home, boiled them in their jackets And ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields On the edge of town. In middle June the light Hung on in the dark furrows at […]...
11. THE INSTRUCTORS WHEN Diogenes quietly sunn’d himself in his barrel, When Calanus with joy leapt in the flame-breathing grave, Oh, what noble lessons were those for the rash son of Philip, Were not the lord of the world e’en for instruction too great! 1789.*...
12. Counting Sheep A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He Wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture For them. They are like grains of rice. He wonders if it is possible to shrink something Out of existence. He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess, If they have any sense of […]...
13. North Atlantic WHEN the sea is everywhere From horizon to horizon.. when the salt and blue fill a circle of horizons.. I swear again how I know The sea is older than anything else And the sea younger than anything else. My first father was a landsman. My tenth father was a sea-lover, a gipsy sea-boy, a […]...
14. Ode To Salt This salt In the saltcellar I once saw in the salt mines. I know You won’t Believe me, But It sings, Salt sings, the skin Of the salt mines Sings With a mouth smothered By the earth. I shivered in those solitudes When I heard The voice of The salt In the desert. Near Antofagasta […]...
15. The Brain is wider than the Sky The Brain is wider than the Sky For put them side by side The one the other will contain With ease and You beside The Brain is deeper than the sea For hold them Blue to Blue The one the other will absorb As Sponges Buckets do The Brain is just the weight of God […]...
16. The Future never spoke The Future never spoke Nor will He like the Dumb Reveal by sign a syllable Of His Profound To Come But when the News be ripe Presents it in the Act Forestalling Preparation Escape or Substitute Indifference to Him The Dower as the Doom His Office but to execute Fate’s Telegram to Him...
17. Bones Sling me under the sea. Pack me down in the salt and wet. No farmer’s plow shall touch my bones. No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak How jokes are gone and empty is my mouth. Long, green-eyed scavengers shall pick my eyes, Purple fish play hide-and-seek, And I shall be song of thunder, crash […]...
18. Solomon To Sheba Sang Solomon to Sheba, And kissed her dusky face, ‘All day long from mid-day We have talked in the one place, All day long from shadowless noon We have gone round and round In the narrow theme of love Like a old horse in a pound.’ To Solomon sang Sheba, Plated on his knees, ‘If […]...
19. The Whole Soul Is it long as a noodle Or fat as an egg? Is it Lumpy like a potato or Ringed like an oak or an Onion and like the onion The same as you go toward The core? That would be Suitable, for is it not The human core and the rest Meant either to keep […]...
20. Still hear the waves It was a brave day under an endlessly clear sky That extended forever from our valley To the unfathomably distant sea. It was a day to remember amongst days of Classical splendour and wonderment, From an unoccupied beach and the virgin Sand crisp and crumbling under flying feet, To the tumbling vastness of twinkling ocean […]...
21. Albert Einstein To Archibald Macleish I should have been a plumber fixing drains. And mending pure white bathtubs for the great Diogenes (who scorned all lies, all liars, and all tyrannies), And then, perhaps, he would bestow on me majesty! (O modesty aside, forgive my fallen pride, O hidden majesty, The lamp, the lantern, the lucid light he sought for […]...
22. Hymn To Life The hair falling on your forehead suddenly lifted. Suddenly something stirred on the ground. The trees are whispering in the dark. Your bare arms will be cold. Far off where we can’t see, the moon must be rising. It hasn’t reached us yet, slipping through the leaves to light up your shoulder. But I know […]...
23. Tom Collins Who never drinks and never bets, But loves his wife and pays his debts And feels content with what he gets? Tom Collins. Who has the utmost confidence That all the banks now in suspense Will meet their paper three years hence? Tom Collins. Who reads the Herald leaders through, And takes the Evening News […]...
24. My Hundred Books A thousand books my library Contains; And all are primed, it seems to me With brains. Mine are so few I scratch in thought My head; For just a hundred of the lot I’ve read. A hundred books, but of the best, I can With wisdom savour and digest And scan. Yet when afar from […]...
25. Cockspur Bush I am lived. I am died. I was two-leafed three times, and grazed, But then I was stemmed and multiplied, Sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised, Earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung By thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing. Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years In now fewer berries, now […]...
26. The Cat's Song Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says The cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing Milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, To fade […]...
27. The Two Devines It was shearing time at the Myall Lake, And then rose the sound through the livelong day Of the constant clash that the shear-blades make When the fastest shearers are making play; But there wasn’t a man in the shearers’ lines That could shear a sheep with the two Devines. They had rung the sheds […]...
28. At Lulworth Cove A Century Back Had I but lived a hundred years ago I might have gone, as I have gone this year, By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know, And Time have placed his finger on me there: “You see that man?” I might have looked, and said, “O yes: I see him. One that boat has […]...
29. Retired Shopman He had the grocer’s counter-stoop, That little man so grey and neat; His moustache had a doleful droop, He hailed me in the slushy street. “I’ve sold my shop,” he said to me, Cupping his hand behind his ear. “My deafness got so bad, you see, Folks had to shout to make me hear.” He […]...
30. 511. Song-O aye my wife she dang me Chorus-O aye my wife she dang me, An’ aft my wife she bang’d me, If ye gie a woman a’ her will, Gude faith! she’ll soon o’er-gang ye. ON peace an’ rest my mind was bent, And, fool I was! I married; But never honest man’s intent Sane cursedly miscarried. O aye my wife, &c. […]...
31. Girl in a Cage HERE in a cage the dollars come down. To the click of a tube the dollars tumble. And out of a mouth the dollars run. I finger the dollars, Paper and silver, Thousands a day. Some days it’s fun to finger the dollars. Some days… the dollars keep on in a sob or a whisper: […]...
32. Devonshire Street W.1 The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet. The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene With Edwardian faience adornment Devonshire Street. No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by. The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm […]...
33. Modern Love XVI: In Our Old Shipwrecked Days In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour, When in the firelight steadily aglow, Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower That eve was left to us: and hushed we sat As lovers to whom Time is whispering. From sudden-opened doors we heard them sing: The nodding […]...
34. Adelaide Crapsey AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July, I read your heart in a book. And your mouth of blue pansy-I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered. And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held […]...
35. Tube Station The tube lift mounts, sap in a stem, And blossoms its load, a black, untidy rose. The fountain of the escalator curls at the crest, breaks and scatters A winnow of men, a sickle of dark spray....
36. Drugs Made Pauline Vague Drugs made Pauline vague. She sat one day at the breakfast table Fingering in a baffled way The fronds of the maidenhair plant. Was it the salt you were looking for dear? Said Dulcie, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier. Chuff chuff Pauline what’s the matter? Said the Brigadier to his wife Who did not […]...
37. To Clementina Black More blest than was of old Diogenes, I have not held my lantern up in vain. Not mine, at least, this evil to complain: “There is none honest among all of these.” Our hopes go down that sailed before the breeze; Our creeds upon the rock are rent in twain; Something it is, if at […]...
38. To My Mother Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of “Mother,” Therefore by that dear name I long have called you- You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death […]...
39. Roadways ONE road leads to London, One road leads to Wales, My road leads me seawards To the white dipping sails. One road leads to the river, And it goes singing slow; My road leads to shipping, Where the bronzed sailors go. Leads me, lures me, calls me To salt green tossing sea; A road without […]...
40. 372. Song-Kellyburn Braes THERE lived a carl in Kellyburn Braes, Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme; And he had a wife was the plague of his days, And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime. Ae day as the carl gaed up the lang glen, Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme; […]...