Compassion

Related poetry:

1. If I weep If I weep, if I come with excuses, my beloved puts cotton wool in his ears. Every cruelty which he commits becomes him, every cruelty which he commits I endure. If he accounts me nonexistent, I account his tyranny generosity. The cure of the ache of my heart is the ache for him; how shall […]...
2. You Felons on Trial in Courts YOU felons on trial in courts; You convicts in prison-cells-you sentenced assassins, chain’d and hand-cuff’d with iron; Who am I, too, that I am not on trial, or in prison? Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d with iron, or my ankles with iron? You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs, […]...
3. The Mind's Liberty The mind, with its own eyes and ears, May for these others have no care; No matter where this body is, The mind is free to go elsewhere. My mind can be a sailor, when This body’s still confined to land; And turn these mortals into trees, That walk in Fleet Street or the Strand. […]...
4. Sonnet CV Let not my love be call’d idolatry, Nor my beloved as an idol show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence; Therefore my verse to constancy confined, One thing expressing, leaves out […]...
5. Sonnet 105: Let not my love be called idolatry Let not my love be called idolatry, Nor my belovèd as an idol show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence; Therefore my verse to constancy confined, One thing expressing, leaves out […]...
6. From: A King Of Kings, A King Among The Kings Come, let us rejoice in James Joyce, in the greatness of this poet, king, and king of poets For he is our poor dead king, he is the monarch and Caesar of English, he is the veritable King of the King’s English The English of the life of the city, and the English of music; […]...
7. Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, Haunting the black air, braver at night; Dreaming evil, I have done my hitch Over the plain houses, light by light: Lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in […]...
8. TO HEAVEN Open thy gates To him who weeping waits, And might come in, But that held back by sin. Let mercy be So kind, to set me free, And I will straight Come in, or force the gate....
9. The Last Unicorn The last unicorn was never free To chose another ending, The plaintive melody entrained With sweet orchestral strains Describing it was sundered in A soured rendition of Our heaven’s harsh dominion. We were never set to let her free From facile bonds, we fondly loved Mythology too much to let her go And kept her […]...
10. Shut Up And Eat Your Toad The disorganization to which I currently belong Has skipped several meetings in a row Which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive. Down at headquarters there’s a secretary And a janitor who I shall call Suzie And boy can she ever shoot straight. She’ll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her […]...
11. St. Peter and the Angel Delivered out of raw continual pain, Smell of darkness, groans of those others To whom he was chained Unchained, and led Past the sleepers, Door after door silently opening Out! And along a long street’s Majestic emptiness under the moon: One hand on the angel’s shoulder, one Feeling the air before him, Eyes open but […]...
12. January 31 Nothing extends a phone Call more effectively than Saying you’re on your way out But she wants to tell you The five things she requires In a man one is intelligence He must have a brain Also he must be good a term She likes because it embraces both The opposite of evil and “good […]...
13. To Germany You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both through fields of thought confined We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each others dearest […]...
14. Hymn 73 The church’s beauty in the eyes of Christ. SS 4:1-11. Kind is the speech of Christ our Lord, Affection sounds in every word: Lo! thou art fair, my love,” he cries, “Not the young doves have sweeter eyes.” [“Sweet are thy lips, thy pleasing voice Salutes mine ear with secret joys; No spice so much […]...
15. The Host I never could imagine God: I don’t suppose I ever will. Beside His altar fire I nod With senile drowsiness but still In old of age as sight grows dim I have a sense of Him. For when I count my sum of days I find so many sweet and good, My mind is full […]...
16. Ophelia My locks are shorn for sorrow Of love which may not be; Tomorrow and tomorrow Are plotting cruelty. The winter wind tangles These ringlets half-grown, The sun sprays with spangles And rays like his own. Oh, quieter and colder Is the stream; he will wait; When my curls touch my shoulder He will comb them […]...
17. A Ritual To Read To Each Other If you don’t know the kind of person I am And I don’t know the kind of person you are A pattern that others made may prevail in the world And following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, A shrug that lets […]...
18. Death My body, eh? Friend Death, how now? Why all this tedious pomp of writ? Thou hast reclaimed it sure and slow For half a century bit by bit. In faith thou knowest more to-day Than I do, where it can be found! This shrivelled lump of suffering clay, To which I am now chained and […]...
19. A Poem For Myself (or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy) I was born in Mississippi; I walked barefooted thru the mud. Born black in Mississippi, Walked barefooted thru the mud. But, when I reached the age of twelve I left that place for good. My daddy chopped cotton And he drank his liquor straight. Said my daddy chopped […]...
20. The Cyclists Spread on the roadway, With open-blown jackets, Like black, soaring pinions, They swoop down the hillside, The Cyclists. Seeming dark-plumaged Birds, after carrion, Careening and circling, Over the dying Of England. She lies with her bosom Beneath them, no longer The Dominant Mother, The Virile but rotting Before time. The smell of her, tainted, Has […]...
21. Joy and Pleasure Now, joy is born of parents poor, And pleasure of our richer kind; Though pleasure’s free, she cannot sing As sweet a song as joy confined. Pleasure’s a Moth, that sleeps by day And dances by false glare at night; But Joy’s a Butterfly, that loves To spread its wings in Nature’s light. Joy’s like […]...
22. O Breath Beneath that loved and celebrated breast, Silent, bored really blindly veined, Grieves, maybe lives and lets Live, passes bets, Something moving but invisibly, And with what clamor why restrained I cannot fathom even a ripple. (See the thin flying of nine black hairs Four around one five the other nipple, Flying almost intolerably on your […]...
23. 536. Song-This is no my ain lassie Chorus-This is no my ain lassie, Fair tho, the lassie be; Weel ken I my ain lassie, Kind love is in her e’re. I SEE a form, I see a face, Ye weel may wi’ the fairest place; It wants, to me, the witching grace, The kind love that’s in her e’e. This is no […]...
24. Regret It’s not for laws I’ve broken That bitter tears I’ve wept, But solemn vows I’ve spoken And promises unkept; It’s not for sins committed My heart is full of rue, But gentle acts omitted, Kind deeds I did not do. I have outlived the blindness, The selfishness of youth; The canker of unkindness, The cruelty […]...
25. Sonnet XLV LEaue lady, in your glasse of christall clene, Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew: And in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane, Most liuely lyke behold your semblant trew. Within my hart, though hardly it can shew, Thing so diuine to vew of earthly eye: The fayre Idea of your celestiall hew, And […]...
26. The Neighborhood I wish I could, like some, forget, And never anguish, nor regret, Dismissive, free to roam the street, No matter how The visions meet. Remembrance is a neighborhood Where convicts live with great and good, Its roads of red, uneven brick, Whose surfaces – both rough and slick – Spread out into a patchwork plan. […]...
27. The Black Unicorn The black unicorn is greedy. The black unicorn is impatient. ‘The black unicorn was mistaken For a shadow or symbol And taken Through a cold country Where mist painted mockeries Of my fury. It is not on her lap where the horn rests But deep in her moonpit Growing. The black unicorn is restless The […]...
28. Barcelona The night before I left Milan A mob jammed the Cathedral Square, And high the tide of passion ran As politics befouled the air. A seething hell of human strife, I shrank back from its evil core, Seeing in this convulsive life The living seeds of war. To Barcelona then I came, And oh the […]...
29. Columbus Cheney This weeping willow! Why do you not plant a few For the millions of children not yet born, As well as for us? Are they not non-existent, or cells asleep Without mind? Or do they come to earth, their birth Rupturing the memory of previous being? Answer! The field of unexplored intuition is yours. But […]...
30. Roulette I’ll wait until my money’s gone Before I take the sleeping pills; Then when they find me in the dawn, Remote from earthly ails and ills They’ll say: “She’s broke, the foreign bitch!” And dump me in the common ditch. So thought I, of all hope bereft, And by my evil fate obsessed; A thousand […]...
31. To Tirzah Whate’er is Born of Mortal Birth, Must be consumed with the Earth To rise from Generation free: Then what have I to do with thee? The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride Blowd in the morn; in evening died But Mercy changed Death into Sleep; The Sexes rose to work & weep. Thou Mother of […]...
32. The Cat With Wings You never saw a cat with wings, I’ll bet a dollar well, I did; ‘Twas one of those fantastic things One runs across in old Madrid. A walloping big tom it was, (Maybe of the Angora line), With silken ears and velvet paws, And silver hair, superbly fine. It sprawled upon a crimson mat, Yet […]...
33. Ignorance Oh happy he who cannot see With scientific eyes; Who does not know how flowers grow, And is not planet wise; Content to find with simple mind Joys as they are: To whom a rose is just a rose, A star a star. It is not good, I deem, to brood On things beyond our […]...
34. Arbolй, Arbolй Tree, tree Dry and green. The girl with the pretty face Is out picking olives. The wind, playboy of towers, Grabs her around the waist. Four riders passed by On Andalusian ponies, With blue and green jackets And big, dark capes. “Come to Cordoba, muchacha.” The girl won’t listen to them. Three young bullfighters passed, […]...
35. Lisette and Eileen “When he was here alive, Eileen, There was a word you might have said; So never mind what I have been, Or anything,-for you are dead. “And after this when I am there Where he is, you’ll be dying still. Your eyes are dead, and your black hair,- The rest of you be what it […]...
36. Sonnet XIV: If He From Heav'n If he from Heav’n that filch’d that living fire Condemn’d by Jove to endless torment be, I greatly marvel how you still go free That far beyond Prometheus did aspire. The fire he stole, although of heav’nly kind, Which from above he craftily did take, Of lifeless clods us living men to make, He did […]...
37. Orchard Trees, January It’s not the case, though some might wish it so Who from a window watch the blizzard blow White riot through their branches vague and stark, That they keep snug beneath their pelted bark. They take affliction in until it jells To crystal ice between their frozen cells, And each of them is inwardly a […]...
38. Thinking of My Brothers in Shantung on the Ninth Day of the Ninth Month Alone now in a strange country, Feeling myself a stranger, On this bright festival day I doubly pine for my kinsfolk. Far away, I know my brothers Will be climbing the heights With dogwood sprays in their jackets, And one man missing!...
39. 100. Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More's THOU flatt’ring mark of friendship kind, Still may thy pages call to mind The dear, the beauteous donor; Tho’ sweetly female ev’ry part, Yet such a head, and more the heart Does both the sexes honour: She show’d her taste refin’d and just, When she selected thee; Yet deviating, own I must, For sae approving […]...
40. A paraphrase Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, in Heaven the same; Give us this day our daily bread, and may our debts to heaven As we our earthly debts forgive by Thee be all forgiven; When tempted or by evil vexed, restore Thou […]...