The old pond

Related poetry:

1. On why it is necessary to talk kindly to frogs i met a frog in my garden today Lurking under a stone – it said There used to be a pond here I know i said i had to dig it up Pity said the frog and looked at me As if i was the thickest mortal A garden without water it croaked Is worse […]...
2. The Pond Night covers the pond with its wing. Under the ringed moon I can make out Your face swimming among minnows and the small Echoing stars. In the night air The surface of the pond is metal. Within, your eyes are open. They contain A memory I recognize, as though We had been children together. Our […]...
3. At Blackwater Pond At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled After a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink A long time. It tastes Like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold Into my body, waking the bones. I hear them Deep inside me, whispering Oh what is that beautiful thing That just happened?...
4. At Great Pond At Great Pond The sun, rising, Scrapes his orange breast On the thick pines, And down tumble A few orange feathers into The dark water. On the far shore A white bird is standing Like a white candle – Or a man, in the distance, In the clasp of some meditation – While all around […]...
5. Clapp's Pond Three miles through the woods Clapp’s Pond sprawls stone gray Among oaks and pines, The late winter fields Where a pheasant blazes up Lifting his yellow legs Under bronze feathers, opening Bronze wings; And one doe, dimpling the ground as she touches Its dampness sharply, flares Out of the brush and gallops away. * By […]...
6. Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond So heavy Is the long-necked, long-bodied heron, Always it is a surprise When her smoke-colored wings Open And she turns From the thick water, From the black sticks Of the summer pond, And slowly Rises into the air And is gone. Then, not for the first or the last time, I take the deep breath […]...
7. Frogs in chorus The chorus frogs in the big lagoon Would sing their songs to the silvery moon. Tenor singers were out of place, For every frog was a double bass. But never a human chorus yet Could beat the accurate time they set. The solo singer began the joke; He sang, “As long as I live I’ll […]...
8. Round-Pond Water ruffled and speckled by galloping wind Which puffs and spurts it into tiny pashing breaks Dashed with lemon-yellow afternoon sunlight. The shining of the sun upon the water Is like a scattering of gold crocus-petals In a long wavering irregular flight. The water is cold to the eye As the wind to the cheek. […]...
9. Summer Evening The frog half fearful jumps across the path, And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath; My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive, Till past, and then the cricket sings more strong, And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear The short night weary with their fretting song. […]...
10. Turtle Now I see it It nudges with its bulldog head The slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble; And now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal Who is leading her soft children From one side of the pond to the other; she keeps Close to the edge And they […]...
11. I Am Poem by Anne-Marie Derése, translated by Judith Skillman. I am the red brand On the shoulder of the condemned, The gallows and the rope, The ax and the block, The whip and the cross. I am the lion’s tooth In the flesh of the gazelle. In my veins I have The blood of the slave […]...
12. The Frog Be kind and tender to the Frog, And do not call him names, As “Slimy skin,” or “Polly-wog,” Or likewise “Ugly James,” Or “Gap-a-grin,” or “Toad-gone-wrong,” Or “Bill Bandy-knees”: The Frog is justly sensitive To epithets like these. No animal will more repay A treatment kind and fair; At least so lonely people say Who […]...
13. Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat On the silent sea we have heard the sound That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet. Under the mile off moon we trembled listening To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound […]...
14. Atavism I was always afraid of Somes’s Pond: Not the little pond, by which the willow stands, Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond. There, where the frost makes all the birches burn Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines Like a polished shell between black […]...
15. Poetry In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps One spark of the planet’s early fires Trapped forever in its net of ice, It’s not love’s later heat that poetry holds, But the atom of the love that drew it forth From the silence: so if the bright coal of his love Begins to smoulder, […]...
16. I Ask You What scene would I want to be enveloped in More than this one, An ordinary night at the kitchen table, Floral wallpaper pressing in, White cabinets full of glass, The telephone silent, A pen tilted back in my hand? It gives me time to think About all that is going on outside Leaves gathering in […]...
17. To G. M. W. And G. F. W Whenas-(I love that “whenas” word- It shows I am a poet, too,) Q. Horace Flaccus gaily stirred The welkin with his tra-la-loo, He little thought one donkey’s back Would carry thus a double load- Father and son upon one jack, Galumphing down the Tibur Road. II Old is the tale-Aesop’s, I think- Of that famed […]...
18. The Bather Where the path to the lake twists out of sight, A puff of dust, the kind bare feet make running, Is what I saw in the dying light, Night swooping down everywhere else. A low branch heavy with leaves Swaying momentarily where the shade Lay thickest, some late bather Disrobing right there for a quick […]...
19. Shema You who live secure In your warm houses Who return at evening to find Hot food and friendly faces: Consider whether this is a man, Who labours in the mud Who knows no peace Who fights for a crust of bread Who dies at a yes or a no. Consider whether this is a woman, […]...
20. The Cat in the Kitchen (For Donald Hall) Have you heard about the boy who walked by The black water? I won’t say much more. Let’s wait a few years. It wanted to be entered. Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand Reaches out and pulls him in. There was no Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, […]...
21. Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks What is so utterly invisible As tomorrow? Not love, Not the wind, Not the inside of a stone. Not anything. And yet, how often I’m fooled I’m wading along In the sunlight And I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining Days ahead I can see the light spilling Like a shower […]...
22. Klage Dreamless sleep – the dusky Eagles Nightlong rush about my head, Man’s golden image drowned In timeless icy tides. On jagged reefs His purpling body. Dark Echoes sound above the seas. Stormy sadness’ sister, see Our lonely skiff sunk down By starry skies: The silent face of night....
23. How the Waters closed above Him How the Waters closed above Him We shall never know How He stretched His Anguish to us That is covered too Spreads the Pond Her Base of Lilies Bold above the Boy Whose unclaimed Hat and Jacket Sum the History...
24. The Banyan Tree O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond, Have you forgotten the little chile, like the birds that have Nested in your branches and left you? Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at The tangle of your roots and plunged underground? The women would come […]...
25. Ballade of a Special Edition He comes; I hear him up the street Bird of ill omen, flapping wide The pinion of a printed sheet, His hoarse note scares the eventide. Of slaughter, theft, and suicide He is the herald and the friend; Now he vociferates with pride A double murder in Mile End! A hanging to his soul is […]...
26. Voices of the Air But then there comes that moment rare When, for no cause that I can find, The little voices of the air Sound above all the sea and wind. The sea and wind do then obey And sighing, sighing double notes Of double basses, content to play A droning chord for the little throats The little […]...
27. His Mansion in the Pool His Mansion in the Pool The Frog forsakes He rises on a Log And statements makes His Auditors two Worlds Deducting me The Orator of April Is hoarse Today His Mittens at his Feet No Hand hath he His eloquence a Bubble As Fame should be Applaud him to discover To your chagrin Demosthenes has […]...
28. Twelve O'Clock Mother, I do want to leave off my lessons now. I have been at my Book all the morning. You say it is only twelve o’clock. Suppose it isn’t any later; Can’t you ever think it is afternoon when it is only twelve O’clock? I can easily imagine now that the sun has reached the […]...
29. Hot she was hot, she was so hot I didn’t want anybody else to have her, And if I didn’t get home on time She’d be gone, and I couldn’t bear that- I’d go mad. . . It was foolish I know, childish, But I was caught in it, I was caught. I delivered all the […]...
30. Late Afternoon: The Onslaught Of Love For William and Emily Maxwell At this time of day One could hear the caulking irons sound Against the hulls in the dockyard. Tar smoke rose between trees And large oily patches floated on the water, Undulating unevenly In the purple sunlight Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze. At this time of day Sounds carried […]...
31. Distress Coils Poem by Anne-Marie Derése, translated by Judith Skillman. The waiting volcano inside us Gnaws, digs, trembles, Weighs its chances. Distress coils up, Shrinks silent like a sick beast. We are unrecognizable, Unique In the certainty of our ferocity....
32. The Harvest Bow As you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot of straw. Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks Harked […]...
33. Voyages Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart I walk by sedge and brown river rot To where the old lake boats went daily out. All the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen In upon itself. Even the channel’s Grown over. Once we set sail here For Bob-Lo, the Brewery Isles, Cleveland. We would have […]...
34. Ducks and wisdom [from a motif by Jean Dunand (1877-1942)] Seven lacqueur ducks on a silver pond Their rippling held in a moveless frieze Nothing now can help them swim beyond The stoned edges (invent a new-age breeze) Eternity is water starved of trees Their fixture is our own – for all we fidget History puts us down […]...
35. What the Captain Said at the Point-to-Point I’ve had a good bump round; my little horse Refused the brook first time, Then jumped it prime; And ran out at the double, But of course There’s always trouble at a double: And then-I don’t know how It was-he turned it up At that big, hairy fence before the plough; And some young silly […]...
36. Bath-Song Sing hey! For the bath at close of day That washes the weary mud away A loon is he that will not sing O! Water Hot is a noble thing! O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain, And the brook that leaps from hill to plain; But better then rain or rippling streams Is […]...
37. Nocturne In A Deserted Brickyard Stuff of the moon Runs on the lapping sand Out to the longest shadows. Under the curving willows, And round the creep of the wave line, Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night....
38. Prairie Waters by Night CHATTER of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water-sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains. And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, in a choir […]...
39. Chemin De Fer Alone on the railroad track I walked with pounding heart. The ties were too close together or maybe too far apart. The scenery was impoverished: scrub-pine and oak; beyond Its mingled gray-green foliage I saw the little pond Where the dirty old hermit lives, lie like an old tear Holding onto its injuries lucidly year […]...
40. Upon The Nipples Of Julia's Breast Have ye beheld (with much delight) A red rose peeping through a white? Or else a cherry (double graced) Within a lily? Centre placed? Or ever marked the pretty beam A strawberry shows half drowned in cream? Or seen rich rubies blushing through A pure smooth pearl, and orient too? So like to this, nay […]...