A June-Tide Echo poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
(After a Richter Concert.) In the long, sad time, when the sky was grey, And the keen blast blew through the city drear, When delight had fled from the night and the day, My chill heart whispered, ” June will be here! ” June with its roses a-sway in the sun, Its […]
A Greek Girl poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
I may not weep, not weep, and he is dead. A weary, weary weight of tears unshed Through the long day in my sad heart I bear; The horrid sun with all unpitying glare Shines down into the dreary weaving-room, Where clangs the ceaseless clatter of the loom, And ceaselessly deft maiden-fingers weave The […]
A Farewell poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
(After Heine.) The sad rain falls from Heaven, A sad bird pipes and sings ; I am sitting here at my window And watching the spires of “King’s.” O fairest of all fair places, Sweetest of all sweet towns! With the birds, and the greyness and greenness, And the men in caps […]
A Cross-Road Epitaph poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
“Am Kreuzweg wird begraben Wer selber brachte sich um.” When first the world grew dark to me I call’d on God, yet came not he. Whereon, as wearier wax’d my lot, On Love I call’d, but Love came not. When a worse evil did befall, Death, on thee only did I call. […]
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
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- […]
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
An ingenuity too astonishing to be quite fortuitous is this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- lined and shaped like a teacup. A step down and you’re into it; a wilderness swallows you up: ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted understory, an overhead spruce-tamarack horizon hinting you’ll never get out of here. But […]
Syrinx poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Like the foghorn that’s all lung, the wind chime that’s all percussion, like the wind itself, that’s merely air in a terrible fret, without so much as a finger to articulate what ails it, the aeolian syrinx, that reed in the throat of a bird, when it comes to the shaping of what we […]
Salvage poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Daily the cortege of crumpled defunct cars goes by by the lasagna- layered flatbed truckload: hardtop reverting to tar smudge, wax shine antiqued to crusted winepress smear, windshield battered to intact ice-tint, a rarity fresh from the Pleistocene. I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the […]
On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod stove-warmed flatiron slid under the covers, mornings a damascene- sealed bizarrerie of fernwork decades ago now waking in northwest London, tea brought up steaming, a Peak Frean biscuit alongside to be nibbled as blue gas leaps up singing decades ago now damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung […]
Nothing Stays Put poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes—a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom— for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics— this fiery […]
Fog poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
A vagueness comes over everything, as though proving color and contour alike dispensable: the lighthouse extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips drunk up like milk in the universal emulsion; houses reverting into the lost and forgotten; granite subsumed, a rumor in a mumble of ocean. Tactile definition, however, has not been totally banished: hanging tassel by […]
Exmoor poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- olor that was to have super- seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock of winter-bedcover-thick- pelted sheep up on the moor; a stile, a church spire, and an excess, at Porlock, of tenderly barbarous antique thatch in tandem with flower- beds, relentlessly pictur- esque, […]
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
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- […]
Easter Morning poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless Amy ClampittAmy Clampitt, […]
Beach Glass poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never […]
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
An ingenuity too astonishing to be quite fortuitous is this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- lined and shaped like a teacup. A step down and you’re into it; a wilderness swallows you up: ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted understory, an overhead spruce-tamarack horizon hinting you’ll never get out of here. But […]
A Silence poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
past parentage or gender beyond sung vocables the slipped-between the so infinitesimal fault line a limitless interiority beyond the woven unicorn the maiden (man-carved worm-eaten) God at her hip incipient the untransfigured cottontail bluebell and primrose growing wild a strawberry chagrin night terrors past the earthlit unearthly masquerade (we shall be changed) […]
Syrinx poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Like the foghorn that’s all lung, the wind chime that’s all percussion, like the wind itself, that’s merely air in a terrible fret, without so much as a finger to articulate what ails it, the aeolian syrinx, that reed in the throat of a bird, when it comes to the shaping of what we […]
Salvage poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Daily the cortege of crumpled defunct cars goes by by the lasagna- layered flatbed truckload: hardtop reverting to tar smudge, wax shine antiqued to crusted winepress smear, windshield battered to intact ice-tint, a rarity fresh from the Pleistocene. I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the […]
A Hermit Thrush poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up the scree-slope of what at high tide will be again an island, to where, a decade since well-being staked the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us back, year after year, lugging the makings of another picnic— the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified […]
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
The West Village by then was changing; before long the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the […]
On The Disadvantages Of Central Heating poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod stove-warmed flatiron slid under the covers, mornings a damascene- sealed bizarrerie of fernwork decades ago now waking in northwest London, tea brought up steaming, a Peak Frean biscuit alongside to be nibbled as blue gas leaps up singing decades ago now damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung […]
A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While the sun stops, or seems to, to define a term for the indeterminable, the human aspect, here in the West Village, spindles to a mutilated dazzle— niched shards of solitude embedded in these brownstone walkups such that the Hudson at the foot of Twelfth Street might be a thing that’s done with mirrors: […]
Nothing Stays Put poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes—a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom— for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics— this […]
Fog poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
A vagueness comes over everything, as though proving color and contour alike dispensable: the lighthouse extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips drunk up like milk in the universal emulsion; houses reverting into the lost and forgotten; granite subsumed, a rumor in a mumble of ocean. Tactile definition, however, has not been totally banished: hanging tassel by […]
Exmoor poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Lost aboard the roll of Kodac- olor that was to have super- seded all need to remember Somerset were: a large flock of winter-bedcover-thick- pelted sheep up on the moor; a stile, a church spire, and an excess, at Porlock, of tenderly barbarous antique thatch in tandem with flower- beds, relentlessly pictur- esque, […]
Easter Morning poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
a stone at dawn cold water in the basin these walls’ rough plaster imageless after the hammering of so much insistence on the need for naming after the travesties that passed as faces, grace: the unction of sheer nonexistence upwelling in this hyacinthine freshet of the unnamed the faceless Amy ClampittAmy Clampitt, […]
Beach Glass poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never […]
A Silence poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
past parentage or gender beyond sung vocables the slipped-between the so infinitesimal fault line a limitless interiority beyond the woven unicorn the maiden (man-carved worm-eaten) God at her hip incipient the untransfigured cottontail bluebell and primrose growing wild a strawberry chagrin night terrors past the earthlit unearthly masquerade (we shall be changed) […]
A Hermit Thrush poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up the scree-slope of what at high tide will be again an island, to where, a decade since well-being staked the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us back, year after year, lugging the makings of another picnic— the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified […]
A Hedge Of Rubber Trees poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
The West Village by then was changing; before long the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the […]
A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
While the sun stops, or seems to, to define a term for the indeterminable, the human aspect, here in the West Village, spindles to a mutilated dazzle— niched shards of solitude embedded in these brownstone walkups such that the Hudson at the foot of Twelfth Street might be a thing that’s done with mirrors: […]
Ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali
Ghazal BY AGHA SHAHID ALI Feel the patient’s heart Pounding—oh please, this once— —JAMES MERRILL I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time. A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time. Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire? A former existence untold in real time … The one you would […]
An Insolent Jew
An Insolent Jew A Limerick There once was a Jew who stole. Who had an evil soul. The creature was unclean, Misanthropic and mean, And like all Jews he was an asshole. Fledermauswww.poetry.monster
Soliloquy In A Tub poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
Tonight I possess the gliding tides of water: Translucent and true. Their perfect perfumes Foam and bubble To coat the surface. Beneath the surface The wondrous water Knows no streak of daylight. Diligently Like a drink It hydrates My awakening face My brown curls And that intangible wonder Dubbed ‘a mind.’ Like a sun of […]
Reviving My Feminity poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
Lifeless – she lies on the cold-blooded floor Like a rug without its warmth and comfort. Nothing but an old ceiling fan gladly stirs the air And lets it tap the ends of her still soft hair. Creaking – the wooden floor beneath my Chilled feet smells of old tradition. I creep – tip-toeing in […]
Portrait of Rage and Age poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
The couple stands still – Hand-drawn And perky like dawn. Femininity had silently signed The brown paper-like frame Into her own – Using her signature Nail-polish-painted red rose And almost cherry lipstick. Age has her black hair Up in twin buns – Almost a couple themselves. Rage manages – Somehow To sneak no peek at […]
Introspection In Evening poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
I acquire the sensational psychology in me Which reliably wraps my mind and me Up in a blissful blanket of yarn – Hand-knitted by Creativity herself. Heater-like – The blanket bathes Us in a glow Of what light feels like. My mind and I breathe united as An inseparable couple. Friend-like – We gleefully greet […]
For Fixation Who Loves Me Back poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
The evening dips – Dips into mourners blue Like Childhood’s perfect paint. Fury. Fireflies Flash like tiny cameras. A lonely car Swishes its windy way down The real road. You – You pop your smiling Cushion face out the window. Now you shrink Into Depths of distance – But there you go again. Again. And […]
A March Afternoon poem – Amy Cavanaugh poems | Poems and Poetry
The lovely terrific ground Wears a paved path And a glamorous glow: Unblocked by barren branches Of premature spring. Somewhere The woods terminate – Giving a kind of birth to a field. And on that flat field The grass still licks And drinks the Rain of revival From last night’s Shimmering showers. A young girl’s […]