Nimrod in September

Related poetry:

1. The Apparitions Because there is safety in derision I talked about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense. Distrustful of thar popular eye Whether it be bold or sly. Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger. I have found nothing half so good […]...
2. September's Baccalaureate September’s Baccalaureate A combination is Of Crickets Crows and Retrospects And a dissembling Breeze That hints without assuming An Innuendo sear That makes the Heart put up its Fun And turn Philosopher....
3. September 1 The golden-rod is yellow; 2 The corn is turning brown; 3 The trees in apple orchards 4 With fruit are bending down. 5 The gentian’s bluest fringes 6 Are curling in the sun; 7 In dusty pods the milkweed 8 Its hidden silk has spun. 9 The sedges flaunt their harvest, 10 In every […]...
4. September On Jessore Road Millions of babies watching the skies Bellies swollen, with big round eyes On Jessore Road long bamboo huts Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of sisters nowhere to go One Million aunts are dying for bread One Million […]...
5. May 24, 1980 I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages, Carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters, Lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis, Dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles. From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives […]...
6. THE HAG The Hag is astride, This night for to ride, The devil and she together; Through thick and through thin, Now out, and then in, Though ne’er so foul be the weather. A thorn or a bur She takes for a spur; With a lash of a bramble she rides now, Through brakes and through briars, […]...
7. September We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold: No clock counts this. When kisses are repeated and the arms hold There is no telling where time is. It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still: Behind the eye a star, Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell Time is nowhere. We stand; […]...
8. September 22 It’s the day of the ram And the head of the year Rosh Ha’Shanah at Services I sat next to Mel Torme who outshone All comers with his bar Mitzvah heroics while on My left is Barnett Newman Big talker whose favorite Subjects include the horses And the stock market he Knows the odds the […]...
9. September Lo! a ripe sheaf of many golden days Gleaned by the year in autumn’s harvest ways, With here and there, blood-tinted as an ember, Some crimson poppy of a late delight Atoning in its splendor for the flight Of summer blooms and joys­ This is September....
10. September I, from a window where the Meuse is wide, Looked eastward out to the September night; The men that in the hopeless battle died Rose, and deployed, and stationed for the fight; A brumal army, vague and ordered large For mile on mile by some pale general,- I saw them lean by companies to the […]...
11. September 1961 This is the year the old ones, The old great ones Leave us alone on the road. The road leads to the sea. We have the words in our pockets, Obscure directions. The old ones Have taken away the light of their presence, We see it moving away over a hill Off to one side. […]...
12. Late September Tang of fruitage in the air; Red boughs bursting everywhere; Shimmering of seeded grass; Hooded gentians all a’mass. Warmth of earth, and cloudless wind Tearing off the husky rind, Blowing feathered seeds to fall By the sun-baked, sheltering wall. Beech trees in a golden haze; Hardy sumachs all ablaze, Glowing through the silver birches. How […]...
13. September 1913 What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone? For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet they […]...
14. September Song born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable You were not. Not forgotten Or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, Sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented Terror, so many routine cries. (I have made An elegy for myself it Is true) […]...
15. The September Gale I’M not a chicken; I have seen Full many a chill September, And though I was a youngster then, That gale I well remember; The day before, my kite-string snapped, And I, my kite pursuing, The wind whisked off my palm-leaf hat; For me two storms were brewing! It came as quarrels sometimes do, When […]...
16. September, The First Day Of School I My child and I hold hands on the way to school, And when I leave him at the first-grade door He cries a little but is brave; he does Let go. My selfish tears remind me how I cried before that door a life ago. I may have had a hard time letting go. […]...
17. The Snakes of September All summer I heard them Rustling in the shrubbery, Outracing me from tier To tier in my garden, A whisper among the viburnums, A signal flashed from the hedgerow, A shadow pulsing In the barberry thicket. Now that the nights are chill And the annuals spent, I should have thought them gone, In a torpor […]...
18. A Calendar of Sonnets: September O golden month! How high thy gold is heaped! The yellow birch-leaves shine like bright coins strung On wands; the chestnut’s yellow pennons tongue To every wind its harvest challenge. Steeped In yellow, still lie fields where wheat was reaped; And yellow still the corn sheaves, stacked among The yellow gourds, which from the earth […]...
19. The Day Is A Poem (September 19, 1939) This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice. A man of genius: that is, of amazing Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child’s soul, Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it. Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon A south […]...
20. The Halt Before Rome September 1867 Is it so, that the sword is broken, Our sword, that was halfway drawn? Is it so, that the light was a spark, That the bird we hailed as the lark Sang in her sleep in the dark, And the song we took for a token Bore false witness of dawn? Spread in the sight […]...
21. Korean Mums beside me in this garden Are huge and daisy-like (why not? are not Oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?), Shrubby and thick-stalked, The leaves pointing up The stems from which The flowers burst in Sunbursts. I love This garden in all its moods, Even under its winter coat Of salt hay, or now, In October, more than […]...
22. 5.7 I don’t care if you are you and I am I. I am not some exotic flower. Whatever coat you have on, I will put it on to warm me… and the shoes however small… I will walk in them to balance our height difference. You don’t need to convert for me; I have already […]...
23. The Sliprails And The Spur The colours of the setting sun Withdrew across the Western land- He raised the sliprails, one by one, And shot them home with trembling hand; Her brown hands clung-her face grew pale- Ah! quivering chin and eyes that brim!- One quick, fierce kiss across the rail, And, ‘Good-bye, Mary!’ ‘Good-bye, Jim!’ Oh, he rides hard […]...
24. The Death Of Autumn When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes, And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes, Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak, Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,- Then leans on me the weight of the year, […]...
25. 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh You can’t run Radio Shack programs In its disc drive. Nor can a Commodore 64 Drive read a file You have created on an IBM Personal Computer. Both Kaypro and Osborne computers use The CP/M operating system But can’t read each other’s Handwriting For they format (write On) discs in different […]...
26. W. Lloyd Garrison Standard Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair; Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame […]...
27. 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...
28. The Wounded Breakfast A huge shoe mounts up from the horizon, Squealing and grinding forward on small wheels, Even as a man sitting to breakfast on his veranda Is suddenly engulfed in a great shadow, almost The size of the night. . . He looks up and sees a huge shoe Ponderously mounting out of the earth. Up […]...
29. It Takes a While to Disappear The city purrs, it hums along, the morning hardly risen. A well-dressed drunk smears her finger across a doorman’s lips and whispers. Someone stumbles. Someone curses. Someone hoses down the pavement. We must have made a mess of things again, all fuzzy black and white And greenish at the corners. Some final thing That put […]...
30. I Have Started To Say I have started to say “A quarter of a century” Or “thirty years back” About my own life. It makes me breathless It’s like falling and recovering In huge gesturing loops Through an empty sky. All that’s left to happen Is some deaths (my own included). Their order, and their manner, Remain to be learnt....
31. Lepracaun or Fairy Shoemaker, The Little Cowboy, what have you heard, Up on the lonely rath’s green mound? Only the plaintive yellow bird Sighing in sultry fields around, Chary, chary, chary, chee-ee! – Only the grasshopper and the bee? – “Tip-tap, rip-rap, Tick-a-tack-too! Scarlet leather, sewn together, This will make a shoe. Left, right, pull it tight; Summer days are […]...
32. Sonnet XLIV: Press'd by the Moon Press’d by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines, But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides. The wild blast, rising from the Western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And […]...
33. At leisure is the Soul At leisure is the Soul That gets a Staggering Blow The Width of Life before it spreads Without a thing to do It begs you give it Work But just the placing Pins Or humblest Patchwork Children do To Help its Vacant Hands...
34. Elegy The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour The bottle in your coat half voda half winter light. To what and to whom does one say yes? If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him? Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb. […]...
35. 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 […]...
36. An Encounter ONCE on the kind of day called “weather breeder,” When the heat slowly hazes and the sun By its own power seems to be undone, I was half boring through, half climbing through A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated, And sorry I ever left […]...
37. Grown-Up Talk Half-Past-Six and I were talking In a very grown-up way; We had got so tired with running That we did not want to play. “How do babies come, I wonder,” He said, looking at the sky, “Does God mix the things together An’ just make it-like a pie?” I was really not quite certain, But […]...
38. Somewhere upon the general Earth Somewhere upon the general Earth Itself exist Today The Magic passive but extant That consecrated me Indifferent Seasons doubtless play Where I for right to be Would pay each Atom that I am But Immortality Reserving that but just to prove Another Date of Thee Oh God of Width, do not for us Curtail Eternity!...
39. The House They are building a house Half a block down And I sit up here With the shades down Listening to the sounds, The hammers pounding in nails, Thack thack thack thack, And then I hear birds, And thack thack thack, And I go to bed, I pull the covers to my throat; They have been […]...
40. Sandhill People I TOOK away three pictures. One was a white gull forming a half-mile arch from the pines toward Waukegan. One was a whistle in the little sandhills, a bird crying either to the sunset gone or the dusk come. One was three spotted waterbirds, zigzagging, cutting scrolls and jags, writing a bird Sanscrit of wing […]...