The Waradgery Tribe

Related poetry:

1. Renunciation It’s a jade branch on the floor, broken in two, love, Or a stain raised on the lapped grains of a suede glove. It’s the lace, blown by a strong breeze, of an old gown With the cranes crying at night, lost in their long sound. It’s a vase made from the noon light in […]...
2. Ballad of Broken Flutes In dreams I crossed a barren land, A land of ruin, far away; Around me hung on every hand A deathful stillness of decay; And silent, as in bleak dismay That song should thus forsaken be, On that forgotten ground there lay The broken flutes of Arcady. The forest that was all so grand When […]...
3. Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas. Half the catalogue of ships is mine: That flight of cranes, long stretched-out line, That once rose, out of Hellas. To an alien land, like a phalanx of cranes – Foam of the gods on the heads of kings – Where do you sail? What would the things Of Troy, be […]...
4. Other Having begun in thought there In that factual embodied wonder What was lost in the emptied lovers Patience and mind I first felt there Wondered again and again what for Myself so meager and finally singular Despite all issued therefrom whether Sister or mother or brother and father Come to love’s emptied place too late […]...
5. A Fantasy I’ll tell you something: every day People are dying. And that’s just the beginning. Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, New orphans. They sit with their hands folded, Trying to decide about this new life. Then they’re in the cemetery, some of them For the first time. They’re frightened of crying, Sometimes […]...
6. Dave Lilly There’s a brook on the side of Greylock that used To be full of trout, But there’s nothing there now but minnows; they say it is all fished Out. I fished there many a Summer day some twenty years ago, And I never quit without getting a mess of a dozen or so. There was […]...
7. Upon Watts' Picture Sic Transit “What I spent I had; what I saved, I lost; what I gave, I have.” But yesterday the tourney, all the eager joy of life, The waving of the banners, and the rattle of the spears, The clash of sword and harness, and the madness of the strife; To-night begin the silence and the peace […]...
8. A Door just opened on a street A Door just opened on a street I lost was passing by An instant’s Width of Warmth disclosed And Wealth and Company. The Door as instant shut And I I lost was passing by Lost doubly but by contrast most Informing misery...
9. Factory Windows are Always Broken FACTORY windows are always broken. Somebody’s always throwing bricks, Somebody’s always heaving cinders, Playing ugly Yahoo tricks. Factory windows are always broken. Other windows are let alone. No one throws through the chapel-window The bitter, snarling, derisive stone. Factory windows are always broken. Something or other is going wrong. Something is rotten I think, in […]...
10. Crimson Changes People DID I see a crucifix in your eyes And nails and Roman soldiers And a dusk Golgotha? Did I see Mary, the changed woman, Washing the feet of all men, Clean as new grass When the old grass burns? Did I see moths in your eyes, lost moths, With a flutter of wings that meant: […]...
11. 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....
12. To My Wife – With A Copy Of My Poems I can write no stately proem As a prelude to my lay; From a poet to a poem I would dare to say. For if of these fallen petals One to you seem fair, Love will waft it till it settles On your hair. And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It […]...
13. Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down As you descend, slowly, falling faster past You this snow, Ghostly, some flakes bio- Luminescent (you plunge, And this lit snow doesn’t land At your feet but keeps falling below You): single-cell-plant chains, shreds Of zooplankton’s mucus food traps, Fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts, Sand grains, pollen….And inside These jagged falling islands Live more microlives, […]...
14. At the End In another time, a linen winding sheet Would already have been drawn About her, the funeral drums by now Would have throbbed their dull tattoo Into the shadows writhing Behind the fire’s eye While a likeness Of her narrow torso, carved And studded with obsidian Might have been passed from hand To hand and rubbed […]...
15. Loss And Gain When I compare What I have lost with what I have gained, What I have missed with what attained, Little room do I find for pride. I am aware How many days have been idly spent; How like an arrow the good intent Has fallen short or been turned aside. But who shall dare To […]...
16. One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things seem filled with the intent To be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: Places, […]...
17. How many schemes may die How many schemes may die In one short Afternoon Entirely unknown To those they most concern The man that was not lost Because by accident He varied by a Ribbon’s width From his accustomed route The Love that would not try Because beside the Door It must be competitions Some unsuspecting Horse was tied Surveying […]...
18. Memoir of a Proud Boy HE lived on the wings of storm. The ashes are in Chihuahua. Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks. Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain. They killed swearing to remember The shot […]...
19. I Fellowed Sleep I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain, Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye, Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon. So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky. I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather, Reaching a second ground […]...
20. Two Sonnets In Memory (Nicola Sacco Bartolomeo Vanzetti) Executed August 23, 1927 I As men have loved their lovers in times past And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace, So have we loved sweet Justice to the last, That now lies here in an unseemly place. The child will quit the cradle and grow wise And stare […]...
21. Hannah Armstrong I wrote him a letter asking him for old times’ sake To discharge my sick boy from the army; But maybe he couldn’t read it. Then I went to town and had James Garber, Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter. But maybe that was lost in the mails. So I traveled all the way […]...
22. Clenched Soul We have lost even this twilight. No one saw us this evening hand in hand While the blue night dropped on the world. I have seen from my window The fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops. Sometimes a piece of sun Burned like a coin in my hand. I remembered you with my […]...
23. Sonnet 76: Why is my verse so barren of new pride? Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my […]...
24. The Lay of the Motor-Car We’re away! and the wind whistles shrewd In our whiskers and teeth; And the granite-like grey of the road Seems to slide underneath. As an eagle might sweep through the sky, So we sweep through the land; And the pallid pedestrians fly When they hear us at hand. We outpace, we outlast, we outstrip! Not […]...
25. Italia Italia! thou art fallen, though with sheen Of battle-spears thy clamorous armies stride From the north Alps to the Sicilian tide! Ay! fallen, though the nations hail thee Queen Because rich gold in every town is seen, And on thy sapphire-lake in tossing pride Of wind-filled vans thy myriad galleys ride Beneath one flag of […]...
26. The Return of Frankenstein He didn’t die in the whirlpool by the mill Where he had fallen in after a wild chase By all the people of the town. Somehow he clung to an overhanging rock Until the villagers went away. And when he came out, he was changed forever, That soft heart of his had hardened And he […]...
27. O-Jazz-O Where the string At Some point, Was umbilical jazz, Or perhaps, In memory, A long lost bloody cross, Buried in some steel cavalry. In what time For whom do we bleed, Lost notes, from some jazzman’s Broken needle. Musical tears from lost Eyes. Broken drumsticks, why? Pitter patter, boom dropping Bombs in the middle Of […]...
28. Chanson Un Peu Naïve What body can be ploughed, Sown, and broken yearly? But she would not die, she vowed, But she has, nearly. Sing, heart sing; Call and carol clearly. And, since she could not die, Care would be a feather, A film over the eye Of two that lie together. Fly, song, fly, Break your little tether. […]...
29. The Cranes of Ibicus Here was a man who watched the river flow Past the huge town, one gray November day. Round him in narrow high-piled streets at play The boys made merry as they saw him go, Murmuring half-loud, with eyes upon the stream, The immortal screed he held within his hand. For he was walking in an […]...
30. Sea Song I will think no more of the sea! Of the big green waves And the hollowed Shore, Of the brown rock caves No more, no more Of the swell and the weed And the bubbling foam. Memory dwells in my far away home, She has nothing To do with me. She is old and bent […]...
31. Lois Spears Here lies the body of Lois Spears, Born Lois Fluke, daughter of Willard Fluke, Wife of Cyrus Spears, Mother of Myrtle and Virgil Spears, Children with clear eyes and sound limbs (I was born blind) I was the happiest of women As wife, mother and housekeeper, Caring for my loved ones, And making my home […]...
32. Aunt Jane When Aunt Jane died we hunted round, And money everywhere we found. How much I do not care to say, But no death duties will we pay, And Aunt Jane will be well content We bilked the bloody Government. While others spent she loved to save, But couldn’t take it to her grave. While others […]...
33. The White Mans Burden Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig And lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips: Maybe it was the voice of the rain crying, A cracked bell, or a torn heart. Something from far off it seemed Deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth, A shout muffled by huge autumns, […]...
34. Schroeder the Fisherman I sat on the bank above Bernadotte And dropped crumbs in the water, Just to see the minnows bump each other, Until the strongest got the prize. Or I went to my little pasture, Where the peaceful swine were asleep in the wallow, Or nosing each other lovingly, And emptied a basket of yellow corn, […]...
35. Reunited Let us begin, dear love, where we left off; Tie up the broken threads of that old dream; And go on happy as before; and seem Lovers again, though all the world may scoff. Let us forget the graves, which lie between Our parting and our meeting, and the tears That rusted out the goldwork […]...
36. Ichabod So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his gray hairs gone Forevermore! Revile him not, the Tempter hath A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Befit his fall! Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage, When he who might Have lighted up and led his […]...
37. 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 […]...
38. Land, Ho! I know ’tis but a loom of land, Yet is it land, and so I will rejoice, I know I cannot hear His voice Upon the shore, nor see Him stand; Yet is it land, ho! land. The land! the land! the lovely land! ‘Far off,’ dost say? Far off-ah, blessиd home! Farewell! farewell! thou […]...
39. Like Truthless Dreams, So Are My Joys Expired Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired, And past return are all my dandled days; My love misled, and fancy quite retired – Of all which passed the sorrow only stays. My lost delights, now clean from sight of land, Have left me all alone in unknown ways; My mind to woe, my life […]...
40. I should not dare to leave my friend I should not dare to leave my friend, Because because if he should die While I was gone and I too late Should reach the Heart that wanted me If I should disappoint the eyes That hunted hunted so to see And could not bear to shut until They “noticed” me they noticed me If […]...