Winter Promises

Related poetry:

1. Winter Song Rain and wind, and wind and rain. Will the Summer come again? Rain on houses, on the street, Wetting all the people’s feet, Though they run with might and main. Rain and wind, and wind and rain. Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow. Will the Winter never go? What do beggar children do With […]...
2. Winter A wrinkled crabbed man they picture thee, Old Winter, with a rugged beard as grey As the long moss upon the apple-tree; Blue-lipt, an icedrop at thy sharp blue nose, Close muffled up, and on thy dreary way Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows. They should have drawn thee by the high-heapt hearth, Old […]...
3. 15. Winter: A Dirge THE WINTRY west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw; Or the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw: While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down, And roars frae bank to brae; And bird and beast in covert rest, And pass the heartless day. “The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,” […]...
4. Promises, Promises I am stretched out under the lean-to Of an old tobacco-shed On a farm in North Carolina. A cardinal sings from the dogwood For the love of marijuana. His song goes over my head. There is such splendour in the grass I might be the picture of happiness. Yet I am utterly bereft Of the […]...
5. Forsaken promises Nothing came to claim my muse, instead I dreamed Of freedoms neatly folded in a treasure chest lying in the debris Of a crater; the best were simple choices, the rest forsaken Promises bombed to shreds beside their makers. All around the sound of raging thunder rumbled In a night lit bright by streaks of […]...
6. Promises Like Pie-Crust Promise me no promises, So will I not promise you: Keep we both our liberties, Never false and never true: Let us hold the die uncast, Free to come as free to go: For I cannot know your past, And of mine what can you know? You, so warm, may once have been Warmer towards […]...
7. Vacant Lot With Pokeweed Tufts, follicles, grubstake Biennial rosettes, a low- Life beach-blond scruff of Couch grass: notwithstanding The interglinting dregs Of wholesale upheaval and Dismemberment, weeds do not Hesitate, the wheeling Rise of the ailanthus halts At nothing-and look! here’s A pokeweed, sprung up from seed Dropped by some vagrant, that’s Seized a foothold: a magenta- Girdered bower, […]...
8. Paradise Seed Where is the seed Of the tree felled, Of the forest burned, Or living root Under ash and cinders? From woven bud What last leaf strives Into life, last Shrivelled flower? Is fruit of our harvest, Our long labour Dust to the core? To what far, fair land Borne on the wind What winged seed […]...
9. Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs […]...
10. Wash All day the blanket snapped and swelled On the line, roused by a hot spring wind…. From there it witnessed the first sparrow, Early flies lifting their sticky feet, And a green haze on the south-sloping hills. Clouds rose over the mountain….At dusk I took the blanket in, and we slept, Restless, under its fragrant […]...
11. A Sight in Camp A SIGHT in camp in the day-break grey and dim, As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless, As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital tent, Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended lying, Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen […]...
12. Winter: My Secret I tell my secret? No indeed, not I: Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But […]...
13. A Girl's Garden A NEIGHBOR of mine in the village Likes to tell how one spring When she was a girl on the farm, she did A childlike thing. One day she asked her father To give her a garden plot To plant and tend and reap herself, And he said, “Why not?” In casting about for a […]...
14. The Task: Book VI, The Winter Walk at Noon (excerpts) Thus heav’nward all things tend. For all were once Perfect, and all must be at length restor’d. So God has greatly purpos’d; who would else In his dishonour’d works himself endure Dishonour, and be wrong’d without redress. Haste then, and wheel away a shatter’d world, Ye slow-revolving seasons! We would see (A sight to which […]...
15. The End of the World Here, at the end of the world, The flowers bleed As if they were hearts, The hearts ooze a darkness Like india ink, & poets dip their pens in & they write. “Here, at the end of the world,” They write, Not knowing what it means. “Here, where the sky nurses on black milk, Where […]...
16. Colors Passing Through Us Purple as tulips in May, mauve Into lush velvet, purple As the stain blackberries leave On the lips, on the hands, The purple of ripe grapes Sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a color, Like a new flower in a bud vase On your desk. Every day I will paint […]...
17. Where? My snowy eupatorium has dropped Its silver threads of petals in the night; No signal told its blossoming had stopped; Its seed-films flutter silent, ghostly white: No answer stirs the shining air, As I ask, “Where?” Beneath the glossy leaves of winter-green Dead lilly-bells lie low, and in their place A rounded disk of pearly […]...
18. The Task: Book IV, The Winter Evening (excerpts) Hark! ’tis the twanging horn! O’er yonder bridge, That with its wearisome but needful length Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright, He comes, the herald of a noisy world, With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks; News from all nations lumb’ring at his back. True to […]...
19. Horse Fiddle FIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind. Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill and read down the river valley on a late summer afternoon, reading it in less than a whisper to Jack on […]...
20. The Seasons: Winter See! Winter comes, to rule the varied Year, Sullen, and sad; with all his rising Train, Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms: Be these my Theme, These, that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought, And heavenly musing. Welcome kindred Glooms! Wish’d, wint’ry, Horrors, hail! With frequent Foot, Pleas’d, have I, in my cheerful Morn of Life, […]...
21. Unlyric Love Song It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first: To offer you now at last my least and my worst: Minor, absurd preserves, The shell’s end-curves, A document kept at the back of a drawer, A tin hidden under the floor, Recalcitrant prides and hesitations: To pile them carefully in a desparate […]...
22. Genesis In the outer world that was before this earth, That was before all shape or space was born, Before the blind first hour of time had birth, Before night knew the moonlight or the morn; Yea, before any world had any light, Or anything called God or man drew breath, Slowly the strong sides of […]...
23. Snowbound, a Winter Idyl To the Memory of the Household It Describes This Poem is Dedicated by the Author “As the Spirit of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial […]...
24. Pleasures I like to find What’s not found At once, but lies Within something of another nature, In repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden In white pulp: the bones of squid Which I pull out and lay Blade by blade on the draining board Tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce The heart, but fragile, […]...
25. 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 […]...
26. Love Letter Written In A Burning Building I am in a crate, the crate that was ours, Full of white shirts and salad greens, The icebox knocking at our delectable knocks, And I wore movies in my eyes, And you wore eggs in your tunnel, And we played sheets, sheets, sheets All day, even in the bathtub like lunatics. But today I […]...
27. Forbidden Fruit all the forbidden fruit I ever Dreamt of or was taught to Resist and fear ripens and Blossoms under the palms of my Hands as they uncover and explore You and in the most secret Corners of my heart as it discovers And adores you the forbidden fruit Of forgiveness the forbidden fruit Of finally […]...
28. The Red Blaze is the Morning The Red Blaze is the Morning The Violet is Noon The Yellow Day is falling And after that is none But Miles of Sparks at Evening Reveal the Width that burned The Territory Argent that Never yet consumed...
29. Winter Seascape The sea runs back against itself With scarcely time for breaking wave To cannonade a slatey shelf And thunder under in a cave. Before the next can fully burst The headwind, blowing harder still, Smooths it to what it was at first – A slowly rolling water-hill. Against the breeze the breakers haste, Against the […]...
30. Winter Complaint Now when I have a cold I am careful with my cold, I consult a physician And I do as I am told. I muffle up my torso In woolly woolly garb, And I quaff great flagons Of sodium bicarb. I munch on aspirin, I lunch on water, And I wouldn’t dream of osculating Anybody’s […]...
31. A Winter Eden A winter garden in an alder swamp, Where conies now come out to sun and romp, As near a paradise as it can be And not melt snow or start a dormant tree. It lifts existence on a plane of snow One level higher than the earth below, One level nearer heaven overhead, And last […]...
32. Spring and Winter ii WHEN icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, To-whit! To-who! a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all […]...
33. To Winter O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors: The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs, Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.’ He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathиd In ribbиd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes, […]...
34. To a Locomotive in Winter THEE for my recitative! Thee in the driving storm, even as now-the snow-the winter-day declining; Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive; Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel; Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides; Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar-now […]...
35. Approach Of Winter The half-stripped trees Struck by a wind together, Bending all, The leaves flutter drily And refuse to let go Or driven like hail Stream bitterly out to one side And fall Where the salvias, hard carmine- Like no leaf that ever was – Edge the bare garden....
36. Those Winter Sundays Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, Then with cracked hands that ached From labor in the weekday weather made Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, And slowly I […]...
37. A Winter Day I The air is silent save where stirs A bugling breeze among the firs; The virgin world in white array Waits for the bridegroom kiss of day; All heaven blooms rarely in the east Where skies are silvery and fleeced, And o’er the orient hills made glad The morning comes in wonder clad; Oh, ’tis […]...
38. Winter Landscape The three men coming down the winter hill In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds At heel, through the arrangement of the trees, Past the five figures at the burning straw, Returning cold and silent to their town, Returning to the drifted snow, the rink Lively with children, to the older men, […]...
39. A Winter Ride Who shall declare the joy of the running! Who shall tell of the pleasures of flight! Springing and spurning the tufts of wild heather, Sweeping, wide-winged, through the blue dome of light. Everything mortal has moments immortal, Swift and God-gifted, immeasurably bright. So with the stretch of the white road before me, Shining snowcrystals rainbowed […]...
40. Winter Clouded with snow The cold winds blow, And shrill on leafless bough The robin with its burning breast Alone sings now. The rayless sun, Day’s journey done, Sheds its last ebbing light On fields in leagues of beauty spread Unearthly white. Thick draws the dark, And spark by spark, The frost-fires kindle, and soon Over […]...