A Channel Passage by Rupert Brooke
The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing — YOU! You, you alone could hold my fancy ever! And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole. […]
1914 V: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, […]
1914 IV: The Dead by Rupert Brooke
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, And sunset, and the colours of the earth. These had seen movement, and heard music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat […]
1914 III: The Dead by Rupert Brooke
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That […]
1914 II: Safety by Rupert Brooke
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest He who has found our hid security, Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest, And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’ We have found safety with all things undying, The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth, The deep […]
1914 I: Peace by Rupert Brooke
Now, God be thanked Who has watched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, […]
Year’s End by Weldon Kees
Year’s End by Weldon Kees The state cracked where they left your breath No longer instrument. Along the shore The sand ripped up, and the newer blood Streaked like a vein to every monument. The empty smoke that drifted near the guns Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud Had the smell of a […]
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees It must have been in March the rug wore through. Now the day passes and I stare At warped pine boards my father’s father nailed, At the twisted grain. Exposed, where emptiness allows, Are the wormholes of eighty years; four generations’ shoes Stumble and scrape and fall To the […]
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water, And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love. The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old: The pilot’s relief on landing is no release. […]
The Furies by Weldon Kees
The Furies by Weldon Kees Not a third that walks beside me, But five or six or more. Whether at dusk or daybreak Or at blinding noon, a retinue Of shadows that no door Excludes.–One like a kind of scrawl, Hands scrawled trembling and blue, A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf With a smile like a […]
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees The surgical mask, the rubber teat Are singed, give off an evil smell. You seem to weep more now that heat Spreads everywhere we look. It says here none of us is well. The warty spottings on the figurines Are nothing you would care to claim. You seem […]
The Bell From Europe by Weldon Kees
The Bell From Europe by Weldon Kees The tower bell in the Tenth Street Church Rang out nostalgia for the refugee Who knew the source of bells by sound. We liked it, but in ignorance. One meets authorities on bells infrequently. Europe alone made bells with such a tone, Herr Mannheim said. The bell Struck […]
The Beach by Weldon Kees
The Beach by Weldon Kees Squat, unshaven, full of gas, Joseph Samuels, former clerk in four large cities, out of work, waits in the darkened underpass. In sanctuary, out of reach, he stares at the fading light outside: the rain beginning: hears the tide that drums along the empty beach. When drops first fell at […]
Round by Weldon Kees
Round by Weldon Kees “Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House. Renan admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.” But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor, And something inside my head Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortssoz is dead. A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan […]
Robinson by Weldon Kees
Robinson by Weldon Kees The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson […]
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees When the coal Gave out, we began Burning the books, one by one; First the set Of Bulwer-Lytton And then the Walter Scott. They gave a lot of warmth. Toward the end, in February, flames Consumed the Greek Tragedians and Baudelaire, Proust, Robert Burton And the Po-Chu-i. […]
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees For a while Let it be enough: The responsive smile, Though effort goes into it. Across the warm room Shared in candlelight, This look beyond shame, Possible now, at night, Goes out to yours. Hidden by day And shaped by fires Grown dead, gone gray, That burned in other […]
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees Last summer, in the blue heat, Over the beach, in the burning air, A legless beggar lurched on calloused fists To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds. He said, “The summer boils away. My life Joins to another life; this parched skin Dries and dies and flakes away, […]
Interregnum by Weldon Kees
Interregnum by Weldon Kees Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant, And leave him stinking in the square. Torture the chancellor. Leave the ambassador Strung by his thumbs from the pleasant Embassy wall, where the vines were. Then drill your hogs and sons for another war. Fire on the screaming crowd, ambassador, Sick chancellor, brave millionaire, And […]
Dead March by Weldon Kees
Dead March by Weldon Kees Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene Prepared the marriage rite, leader and whore, Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on. Someone in uniform hums Brahms. Servants prepare Eyewitness stories as the night comes down, as smoking coals await Boots on the stone, the occupying troops. Howl ministers. […]
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years […]
Colloquy by Weldon Kees
Colloquy by Weldon Kees In the broken light, in owl weather, Webs on the lawn where the leaves end, I took the thin moon and the sky for cover To pick the cat’s brains and descend A weedy hill. I found him groveling Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge, Furred and somnolent.—”I bring,” I said, […]
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees Unmanageable as history: these Followers of Tammuz to the land That offered no return, where dust Grew thick on every bolt and door. And so the world Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair. Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog, Who shines […]
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees Between the visits to the shock ward The doctors used to let you play On the old upright Baldwin Donated by a former patient Who is said to be quite stable now. And all day long you played Chopin, Badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t Screaming on the porch […]
1926 by Weldon Kees
1926 by Weldon Kees The porchlight coming on again, Early November, the dead leaves Raked in piles, the wicker swing Creaking. Across the lots A phonograph is playing Ja-Da. An orange moon. I see the lives Of neighbors, mapped and marred Like all the wars ahead, and R. Insane, B. with his throat cut, Fifteen […]
Yesterday by W. S. Merwin
Yesterday by W. S. Merwin My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand he says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know even when I was living in the same city he says maybe I would […]
Wish by W. S. Merwin
Wish by W. S. Merwin The star in my Hand is falling All the uniforms know what’s no use May I bow to Necessity not To her hirelings ————— 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. […]
Whenever I Go There by W. S. Merwin
Whenever I Go There by W. S. Merwin Whenever I go there everything is changed The stamps on the bandages the titles Of the professors of water The portrait of Glare the reasons for The white mourning In new rocks new insects are sitting With the lights off And once more I remember that the […]
When You Go Away by W. S. Merwin
When You Go Away by W. S. Merwin When you go away the wind clicks around to the north The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls Showing the black walls The clock goes back to striking the same hour That has no place in the years And at night wrapped in […]
Vehicles by W. S. Merwin
Vehicles by W. S. Merwin This is a place on the way after the distances can no longer be kept straight here in this dark corner of the barn a mound of wheels has convened along raveling courses to stop in a single moment and lie down as still as the chariots of the Pharaohs […]
Unknown Bird by W. S. Merwin
Unknown Bird by W. S. Merwin Out of the dry days through the dusty leaves far across the valley those few notes never heard here before one fluted phrase floating over its wandering secret all at once wells up somewhere else and is gone before it goes on fallen into its own echo leaving a […]
The Speed Of Light by W. S. Merwin
The Speed Of Light by W. S. Merwin So gradual in those summers was the going of the age it seemed that the long days setting out when the stars faded over the mountains were not leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew glittered in the webs it appeared […]
The Source by W. S. Merwin
The Source by W. S. Merwin There in the fringe of trees between the upper field and the edge of the one below it that runs above the valley one time I heard in the early days of summer the clear ringing six notes that I knew were the opening of the Fingal’s Cave Overture […]
The Ships Are Made Ready In Silence by W. S. Merwin
The Ships Are Made Ready In Silence by W. S. Merwin Moored to the same ring: The hour, the darkness and I, Our compasses hooded like falcons. Now the memory of you comes aching in With a wash of broken bits which never left port In which once we planned voyages, They come knocking like […]
The River Of Bees by W. S. Merwin
The River Of Bees by W. S. Merwin In a dream I returned to the river of bees Five orange trees by the bridge and Beside two mills my house Into whose courtyard a blind man followed The goats and stood singing Of what was older Soon it will be fifteen years He was old […]
The Burnt Child by W. S. Merwin
The Burnt Child by W. S. Merwin Matches among other things that were not allowed never would be lying high in a cool blue box that opened in other hands and there they all were bodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns white sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring fire after fire […]
Term by W. S. Merwin
Term by W. S. Merwin At the last minute a word is waiting not heard that way before and not to be repeated or ever be remembered one that always had been a household word used in speaking of the ordinary everyday recurrences of living not newly chosen or long considered or a matter for […]
Some Last Questions by W. S. Merwin
Some Last Questions by W. S. Merwin What is the head A. Ash What are the eyes A. The wells have fallen in and have Inhabitants What are the feet A. Thumbs left after the auction No what are the feet A. Under them the impossible road is moving Down which the broken necked mice […]
One of the Lives by W. S. Merwin
One of the Lives by W. S. Merwin If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father had broken a leg parachuting into Provence to join the resistance in the final stage of the war and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north out of Italy and if the friend […]
On the Subject of Poetry by W. S. Merwin
On the Subject of Poetry by W. S. Merwin I do not understand the world, Father. By the millpond at the end of the garden There is a man who slouches listening To the wheel revolving in the stream, only There is no wheel there to revolve. He sits in the end of March, but […]