South Africa by Ronald G. Auguste
(For Nelson Mandela) Indeed! It is a new and shining land! So do not waste the New Day passing blame! From utter desolation, something grand Is rising … to obliterate the shame! The sun has set upon the sorry fields, And golden stars are twinkling in the skies. A new sun, rising on the New […]
Shattered Dreams. Broken Promises. by Russell James
Shattered Dreams. Broken Promises. by Russell James Shattered Dreams. Broken Promises. Unachieved Goals sadden souls. Feeling lost with no where to go feeling alone filled with sorrow. Went down the wrong path. Now I’m feeling the wrath of absolute failure man oh man this is such a Disaster. Will I be able to pick myself […]
Savour Your Life by Ronald G. Auguste
(For Sedacy Walden, my Grandson) Savor your life, and try to live it well! Each day should be a milestone on the path Devoted to pure Truth, where Angels dwell, And Love and Kindness keep one’s mind from wrath. Cherish each moment of each passing day. Your life should be a charm, where joy holds […]
Rosslyn To The Prime Minister by Graham Rowlands
Whatever I do now I’ll have your consensus against me— quite right to say you snow in the tropics only at the highest altitude of your own risk if you want an alternative Australia. But you & your consensus don’t do you, sport? Sports? Father? It’s only your economy, after all— refining, processing, high-tech. We’re […]
Writing to Onegin by Ruth Padel
Writing to Onegin by Ruth Padel (After Pushkin) Look at the bare wood hand-waxed floor and long White dressing-gown, the good child’s writing-desk And passionate cold feet Summoning music of the night; tumbrils, gongs And gamelans; with one neat pen, one candle Puttering its life out hour by hour. Is “Tell Him I love him” […]
Icicles round a Tree in Dumfriesshire by Ruth Padel
Icicles round a Tree in Dumfriesshire by Ruth Padel We’re talking different kinds of vulnerability here. These icicles aren’t going to last for ever Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun. But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning, And the famous American sculptor Who scrambles the world with his tripod […]
Conqueror by Russell Hughes Ragsdale
Conqueror by Russell Hughes Ragsdale I was a gulp of high air; a bird breathing in, a black dot on blue paper, a privileged recipient of finite sacrament of souls of flying saints. That all happened the moment you taught me splendid roundness as defined by the touch of your lips. The other mysteries fell, […]
Conversation 4: On Place by Rosmarie Waldrop
Conversation 4: On Place by Rosmarie Waldrop I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power. I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander […]
To A Young Lady. On Her Recovery From A Fever by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Why need I say, Louisa dear! How glad I am to see you here, A lovely convalescent; Risen from the bed of pain and fear, And feverish heat incessant. The sunny showers, the dappled sky, The little birds that warble high, Their vernal loves commencing, Will better welcome you than I With their sweet influencing. […]
Written In Early Youth. The Time,–An Autumnal Evening by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O thou wild fancy, check thy wing! No more Those thin white flakes, those purple clouds explore! Nor there with happy spirits speed thy light Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light; Nor in yon gleam, where slow descends the day, With western peasants hail the morning ray! Ah! rather bid the perished pleasures move, […]
Fire, Famine, And Slaughter : A War Eclogue by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Scene a desolate Tract in la Vendee. Famine is discovered lying on the ground; to her enter Fire and Slaughter. Fam. Sister! sisters! who sent you here? Slau. [to Fire.] I will whisper it in her ear. Fire. No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: ‘Twill make a holiday in Hell. No! no! […]
Fancy In Nubibus, Or The Poet In The Clouds by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O! it is pleasant with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please, Or let the easily persuaded eyes Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend’s fancy; or with head bent low And cheek aslant see rivers flow of […]
Epitaph On An Infant. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Its balmy lips the infant blest Relaxing from its mother’s breast, How sweet it heaves the happy sigh Of innocent satiety! And such my infant’s latest sigh! Oh tell, rude stone! the passer by, That here the pretty babe doth lie, Death sang to sleep with Lullaby. ————— The End And that’s the End of […]
What would I do without this world by Samuel Beckett
what would I do without this world faceless incurious where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end body and shadow together are engulfed what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the pantings the […]
Cascando by Samuel Beckett
1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like […]
To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo
To a Commencement of Scoundrels by Samuel Hazo My boys, we lied to you. The world by definition stinks of Cain, no matter what your teachers told you. Heroes and the fools of God may rise like accidental green or gray saharas, but the sand stays smotheringly near. Deny me if you can. Already you […]
The Nearness That Is All by Samuel Hazo
The Nearness That Is All by Samuel Hazo Love’s what Shakespeare never said by saying, “You have bereft me of all words, lady.” Love is the man who siphoned phlegm from his ill wife’s throat three times a day for seven years. Love’s what the Arabs mean when they bless those with children: “May God […]
The Middle of the World by Samuel Hazo
The Middle of the World by Samuel Hazo Call it the dark wood’s year. Call it a year of hell and mountains and a guide to keep at bay the leopard, lion and the wolf. Call it something! I am ripe for parables. My only mountain is the one I climb to work, and I […]
The First Sam Hazo at the Last by Samuel Hazo
The First Sam Hazo at the Last by Samuel Hazo A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to […]
The Cleaving by Samuel Hazo
The Cleaving by Samuel Hazo Imagining my wife dead, I am stopped, stilled, halved and driven singly back to fears too real for loneliness alone to name. Then, nothing. Slowly intimidations shame me back and up from hell like Orpheus, saying it was not time, it was not time to leave her rouged and coffined […]
Carol of a Father by Samuel Hazo
Carol of a Father by Samuel Hazo He runs ahead to ford a flood of leaves— he suddenly a forager and I the lagging child content to stay behind and watch the gold upheavals at the curb submerge his surging ankles and subside. A word could leash him back or make him turn and ask […]
To A Young Lady. On Her Recovery From A Fever by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Why need I say, Louisa dear! How glad I am to see you here, A lovely convalescent; Risen from the bed of pain and fear, And feverish heat incessant. The sunny showers, the dappled sky, The little birds that warble high, Their vernal loves commencing, Will better welcome you than I With their sweet influencing. […]
Written In Early Youth. The Time,–An Autumnal Evening by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O thou wild fancy, check thy wing! No more Those thin white flakes, those purple clouds explore! Nor there with happy spirits speed thy light Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light; Nor in yon gleam, where slow descends the day, With western peasants hail the morning ray! Ah! rather bid the perished pleasures move, […]
The Lime-tree Bower my Prison by Samuel Coleridge
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top […]
Psyche by Samuel Coleridge
The butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name– But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade Of mortal life !–For in this earthly frame Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed. ————— […]
Brockley Coomb by Samuel Coleridge
Lines composed while climbing the left ascent of Brockley Coomb, May 1795 With many a pause and oft reverted eye I climb the Coomb’s ascent: sweet songsters near Warble in shade their wild-wood melody: Far off the unvarying Cuckoo soothes my ear. Up scour the startling stragglers of the flock That on green plots o’er […]
As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood (fragment) by Samuel Coleridge
As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood, That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the flood Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank Of its wide base controls the fronting bank, (By the slant current’s pressure scoop’d away The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled bay) High in the Fork the uncouth Idol […]
Constancy To An Ideal Object by Samuel Coleridge
Since all, that beat about in Nature’s range, Or veer or vanish ; why should’st thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning THOUGHT ! that liv’st but in the brain ? Call to the HOURS, that in the distance play, The faery people of the future day– — Fond THOUGHT […]
A Tombless Epitaph by Samuel Coleridge
‘Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane ! (So call him, for so mingling blame with praise, And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends, Masking his birth-name, wont to character His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal,) ‘Tis true that, passionate for ancient truths, And honouring with religious love the Great Of elder times, he hated to excess, […]
Cologne by Samuel Coleridge
In K?hln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang’d with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches ; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks ! Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of […]
Duty Surviving Self-Love by Samuel Coleridge
Unchanged within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others’ Wanings should’st thou fret ? Then only might’st thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight. O wiselier then, from feeble […]
Epitaph by Samuel Coleridge
Stop, Christian passer-by : Stop, child of God, And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he– O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.– That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death […]
Dejection: An Ode by Samuel Coleridge
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms ; And I fear, I fear, My Master dear ! We shall have a deadly storm. Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence ————————————————————————— I Well ! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, […]
About The Nightingale by Samuel Coleridge
From a letter from STC to Wordsworth after writing The Nightingale: In stale blank verse a subject stale I send per post my Nightingale; And like an honest bard, dear Wordsworth, You’ll tell me what you think, my Bird’s worth. My own opinion’s briefly this– His bill he opens not amiss; And when he has […]
Fears In Solitude by Samuel Coleridge
A green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent dell ! O’er stiller place No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope, Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on, All golden with the never-bloomless furze, Which now blooms most profusely : but the dell, Bathed […]
Christabel by Samuel Coleridge
PART I ‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu-whit!- Tu-whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff, which From her kennel beneath the rock Maketh answer to the clock, Four for the […]
Epigram by Samuel Coleridge
Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — the ultimate repository of world poetry. Poetry […]
Phantom by Samuel Coleridge
All look and likeness caught from earth All accident of kin and birth, Had pass’d away. There was no trace Of aught on that illumined face, Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone But of one spirit all her own ;– She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly. ————— The End And that’s […]
A Mathematical Problem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This is now–this was erst, Proposition the first–and Problem the first. I. On a given finite Line Which must no way incline; To describe an equi– –lateral Tri– –A, N, G, L, E. Now let A. B. Be the given line Which must no way incline; The great Mathematician Makes this Requisition, That we describe […]
Fire, Famine, And Slaughter : A War Eclogue by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Scene a desolate Tract in la Vendee. Famine is discovered lying on the ground; to her enter Fire and Slaughter. Fam. Sister! sisters! who sent you here? Slau. [to Fire.] I will whisper it in her ear. Fire. No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: ‘Twill make a holiday in Hell. No! no! […]