Swimming Poems | Famous Swimming Poems

    Share:

    The World Is A Beautiful Place Poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    The world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don’t mind happiness
    not always being
    so very much fun
    if you don’t mind a touch of hell
    now and then
    just when everything is fine
    because even in heaven
    they don’t sing
    all the time

    The world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don’t mind some people dying
    all the time
    or maybe only starving
    some of the time
    which isn’t half bad
    if it isn’t you

    Oh the world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don’t much mind
    a few dead minds
    in the higher places
    or a bomb or two
    now and then
    in your upturned faces
    or such other improprieties
    as our Name Brand society
    is prey to
    with its men of distinction
    and its men of extinction
    and its priests
    and other patrolmen

    and its various segregations
    and congressional investigations
    and other constipations
    that our fool flesh
    is heir to

    Yes the world is the best place of all
    for a lot of such things as
    making the fun scene
    and making the love scene
    and making the sad scene
    and singing low songs and having inspirations
    and walking around
    looking at everything
    and smelling flowers
    and goosing statues
    and even thinking
    and kissing people and
    making babies and wearing pants
    and waving hats and
    dancing
    and going swimming in rivers
    on picnics
    in the middle of the summer
    and just generally
    ‘living it up’
    Yes
    but then right in the middle of it
    comes the smiling

    mortician

     

     

    Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) Poem by Anne Sexton

    Consider
    a girl who keeps slipping off,
    arms limp as old carrots,
    into the hypnotist’s trance,
    into a spirit world
    speaking with the gift of tongues.
    She is stuck in the time machine,
    suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
    as inward as a snail,
    learning to talk again.
    She’s on a voyage.
    She is swimming further and further back,
    up like a salmon,
    struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
    Little doll child,
    come here to Papa.
    Sit on my knee.
    I have kisses for the back of your neck.
    A penny for your thoughts, Princess.
    I will hunt them like an emerald.

    Come be my snooky
    and I will give you a root.
    That kind of voyage,
    rank as a honeysuckle.
    Once
    a king had a christening
    for his daughter Briar Rose
    and because he had only twelve gold plates
    he asked only twelve fairies
    to the grand event.
    The thirteenth fairy,
    her fingers as long and thing as straws,
    her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
    her uterus an empty teacup,
    arrived with an evil gift.
    She made this prophecy:
    The princess shall prick herself
    on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
    and then fall down dead.
    Kaputt!
    The court fell silent.
    The king looked like Munch’s Scream
    Fairies’ prophecies,
    in times like those,
    held water.
    However the twelfth fairy
    had a certain kind of eraser
    and thus she mitigated the curse
    changing that death
    into a hundred-year sleep.

    The king ordered every spinning wheel
    exterminated and exorcised.
    Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
    and each night the king
    bit the hem of her gown
    to keep her safe.
    He fastened the moon up
    with a safety pin
    to give her perpetual light
    He forced every male in the court
    to scour his tongue with Bab-o
    lest they poison the air she dwelt in.
    Thus she dwelt in his odor.
    Rank as honeysuckle.

    On her fifteenth birthday
    she pricked her finger
    on a charred spinning wheel
    and the clocks stopped.
    Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
    The king and queen went to sleep,
    the courtiers, the flies on the wall.
    The fire in the hearth grew still
    and the roast meat stopped crackling.
    The trees turned into metal
    and the dog became china.
    They all lay in a trance,
    each a catatonic
    stuck in a time machine.
    Even the frogs were zombies.
    Only a bunch of briar roses grew
    forming a great wall of tacks
    around the castle.
    Many princes
    tried to get through the brambles
    for they had heard much of Briar Rose
    but they had not scoured their tongues
    so they were held by the thorns
    and thus were crucified.
    In due time
    a hundred years passed
    and a prince got through.
    The briars parted as if for Moses
    and the prince found the tableau intact.
    He kissed Briar Rose
    and she woke up crying:
    Daddy! Daddy!
    Presto! She’s out of prison!
    She married the prince
    and all went well
    except for the fear –
    the fear of sleep.

    Briar Rose
    was an insomniac…
    She could not nap
    or lie in sleep
    without the court chemist
    mixing her some knock-out drops
    and never in the prince’s presence.
    If if is to come, she said,
    sleep must take me unawares
    while I am laughing or dancing
    so that I do not know that brutal place
    where I lie down with cattle prods,
    the hole in my cheek open.
    Further, I must not dream
    for when I do I see the table set
    and a faltering crone at my place,
    her eyes burnt by cigarettes
    as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.

    I must not sleep
    for while I’m asleep I’m ninety
    and think I’m dying.
    Death rattles in my throat
    like a marble.
    I wear tubes like earrings.
    I lie as still as a bar of iron.
    You can stick a needle
    through my kneecap and I won’t flinch.
    I’m all shot up with Novocain.
    This trance girl
    is yours to do with.
    You could lay her in a grave,
    an awful package,
    and shovel dirt on her face
    and she’d never call back: Hello there!
    But if you kissed her on the mouth
    her eyes would spring open
    and she’d call out: Daddy! Daddy!
    Presto!
    She’s out of prison.

    There was a theft.
    That much I am told.
    I was abandoned.
    That much I know.
    I was forced backward.
    I was forced forward.
    I was passed hand to hand
    like a bowl of fruit.
    Each night I am nailed into place
    and forget who I am.
    Daddy?
    That’s another kind of prison.
    It’s not the prince at all,
    but my father
    drunkeningly bends over my bed,
    circling the abyss like a shark,
    my father thick upon me
    like some sleeping jellyfish.
    What voyage is this, little girl?
    This coming out of prison?
    God help –
    this life after death?

     

     

    Candle Hat Poem by Billy Collins

    In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
    Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
    Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
    Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
    from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

    But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
    and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
    addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

    He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
    we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
    which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
    a device that allowed him to work into the night.

    You can only wonder what it would be like
    to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
    as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

    But once you see this hat there is no need to read
    any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

    To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
    lighting the candles one by one, then placing
    the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

    Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
    the laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

    Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
    with all the shadows flying across the walls.

    Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
    one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
    “Come in, ” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”
    as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
    illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

     

     

    Ode To A Large Tuna In The Market Poem by Pablo Neruda

    Among the market greens,
    a bullet
    from the ocean
    depths,
    a swimming
    projectile,
    I saw you,
    dead.

    All around you
    were lettuces,
    sea foam
    of the earth,
    carrots,
    grapes,
    but
    of the ocean
    truth,
    of the unknown,
    of the
    unfathomable
    shadow, the
    depths
    of the sea,
    the abyss,
    only you had survived,
    a pitch-black, varnished
    witness
    to deepest night.

    Only you, well-aimed
    dark bullet
    from the abyss,
    mangled
    at one tip,
    but constantly
    reborn,
    at anchor in the current,
    winged fins
    windmilling
    in the swift
    flight
    of
    the
    marine
    shadow,
    a mourning arrow,
    dart of the sea,
    olive, oily fish.
    I saw you dead,
    a deceased king
    of my own ocean,
    green
    assault, silver
    submarine fir,
    seed
    of seaquakes,
    now
    only dead remains,
    yet
    in all the market
    yours
    was the only
    purposeful form
    amid
    the bewildering rout
    of nature;
    amid the fragile greens
    you were
    a solitary ship,
    armed
    among the vegetables
    fin and prow black and oiled,
    as if you were still
    the vessel of the wind,
    the one and only
    pure
    ocean
    machine:
    unflawed, navigating
    the waters of death.

     

     

    A Man Young And Old: Iii. The Mermaid Poem by William Butler Yeats

    A mermaid found a swimming lad,
    Picked him for her own,
    Pressed her body to his body,
    Laughed; and plunging down
    Forgot in cruel happiness
    That even lovers drown.

     

     

    Frost At Midnight Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    The Frost performs its secret ministry,
    Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
    Came loud–and hark, again ! loud as before.
    The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
    Have left me to that solitude, which suits
    Abstruser musings : save that at my side
    My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
    ‘Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
    And vexes meditation with its strange
    And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
    This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood,
    With all the numberless goings-on of life,
    Inaudible as dreams ! the thin blue flame
    Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
    Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
    Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
    Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
    Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
    Making it a companionable form,
    Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
    By its own moods interprets, every where
    Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
    And makes a toy of Thought.

    [Image] [Image] [Image] [Image]But O ! how oft,
    How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
    Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
    To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
    With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
    Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
    Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
    From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
    So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
    With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
    Most like articulate sounds of things to come !
    So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
    Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams !
    And so I brooded all the following morn,
    Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
    Fixed with mock study on my swimming book :
    Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
    A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
    For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
    Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
    My play-mate when we both were clothed alike !

    Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
    Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
    Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
    And momentary pauses of the thought !
    My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart
    With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
    And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
    And in far other scenes ! For I was reared
    In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
    And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
    But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
    By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
    Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
    Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
    And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear
    The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
    Of that eternal language, which thy God
    Utters, who from eternity doth teach
    Himself in all, and all things in himself.
    Great universal Teacher ! he shall mould
    Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

    Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
    Whether the summer clothe the general earth
    With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
    Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
    Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
    Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
    Heard only in the trances of the blast,
    Or if the secret ministry of frost
    Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
    Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

     

     

    Beauty And The Beast Poem by Tango

    Nature is beautiful, quiet, and serene,
    nature is the forest, with its many shades of green.
    Nature is the birds, welcoming in the dawn,
    nature is a calf, struggling to its feet as soon as it is born.
    Nature is a salmon, swimming against the stream,
    nature is a volcanic geyser, venting off steam.

    Nature is a beast, kicking up a storm,
    nature is the trees, all bent, and broken, looking so forlorn.
    Nature is lightning striking the ground,
    nature is a forest fire, consuming all around.
    Nature is a tornado, with its screaming roar,
    nature is a tidal wave, washing every thing ashore.
    Nature can be a beauty, and nature can be a beast.

     

     

    Leaves Of Grass. A Carol Of Harvest For 1867 Poem by Walt Whitman

    A SONG of the good green grass!
    A song no more of the city streets;
    A song of farms–a song of the soil of fields.

    A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers
    handle the pitch-fork;
    A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

    For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for myself,
    Now I awhile return to thee, O soil of Autumn fields,
    Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,
    Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,
    Tuning a verse for thee. 10

    O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
    O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
    O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
    A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.

    Ever upon this stage,
    Is acted God’s calm, annual drama,
    Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
    Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
    The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
    The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees, 20
    The flowers, the grass, the lilliput, countless armies of the grass,
    The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,
    The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra,
    The stretching, light-hung roof of clouds–the clear cerulean, and
    the bulging, silvery fringes,
    The high dilating stars, the placid, beckoning stars,
    The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,
    The shows of all the varied lands, and all the growths and products.

    Fecund America! To-day,
    Thou art all over set in births and joys!
    Thou groan’st with riches! thy wealth clothes thee as with a swathing
    garment! 30
    Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions!
    A myriad-twining life, like interlacing vines, binds all thy vast
    demesne!
    As some huge ship, freighted to water’s edge, thou ridest into port!
    As rain falls from the heaven, and vapors rise from earth, so have
    the precious values fallen upon thee, and risen out of thee!
    Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!
    Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty!
    Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns!
    Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle, and lookest out upon
    thy world, and lookest East, and lookest West!
    Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles–that giv’st a
    million farms, and missest nothing!
    Thou All-Acceptress–thou Hospitable–(thou only art hospitable, as
    God is hospitable.) 40

    When late I sang, sad was my voice;
    Sad were the shows around me, with deafening noises of hatred, and
    smoke of conflict;
    In the midst of the armies, the Heroes, I stood,
    Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying.

    But now I sing not War,
    Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,
    Nor the regiments hastily coming up, deploying in line of battle.

    No more the dead and wounded;
    No more the sad, unnatural shows of War.

    Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks? the first forth-stepping
    armies? 50
    Ask room, alas, the ghastly ranks–the armies dread that follow’d.

    (Pass–pass, ye proud brigades!
    So handsome, dress’d in blue–with your tramping, sinewy legs;
    With your shoulders young and strong–with your knapsacks and your
    muskets;
    –How elate I stood and watch’d you, where, starting off, you
    march’d!

    Pass;–then rattle, drums, again!
    Scream, you steamers on the river, out of whistles loud and shrill,
    your salutes!
    For an army heaves in sight–O another gathering army!
    Swarming, trailing on the rear–O you dread, accruing army!
    O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea! with your
    fever! 60
    O my land’s maimed darlings! with the plenteous bloody bandage and
    the crutch!
    Lo! your pallid army follow’d!)

    But on these days of brightness,
    On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes, the
    high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns,
    Shall the dead intrude?

    Ah, the dead to me mar not–they fit well in Nature;
    They fit very well in the landscape, under the trees and grass,
    And along the edge of the sky, in the horizon’s far margin.

    Nor do I forget you, departed;
    Nor in winter or summer, my lost ones; 70
    But most, in the open air, as now, when my soul is rapt and at
    peace–like pleasing phantoms,
    Your dear memories, rising, glide silently by me.

    I saw the day, the return of the Heroes;
    (Yet the Heroes never surpass’d, shall never return;
    Them, that day, I saw not.)

    I saw the interminable Corps–I saw the processions of armies,
    I saw them approaching, defiling by, with divisions,
    Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in clusters of
    mighty camps.

    No holiday soldiers!–youthful, yet veterans;
    Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and
    workshop,
    Harden’d of many a long campaign and sweaty march, 80
    Inured on many a hard-fought, bloody field.

    A pause–the armies wait;
    A million flush’d, embattled conquerors wait;
    The world, too, waits–then, soft as breaking night, and sure as
    dawn,
    They melt–they disappear.

    Exult, indeed, O lands! victorious lands!
    Not there your victory, on those red, shuddering fields;
    But here and hence your victory.

    Melt, melt away, ye armies! disperse, ye blue-clad soldiers!
    Resolve ye back again–give up, for good, your deadly arms; 90
    Other the arms, the fields henceforth for you, or South or North, or
    East or West,
    With saner wars–sweet wars–life-giving wars.

    Loud, O my throat, and clear, O soul!
    The season of thanks, and the voice of full-yielding;
    The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.

    All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me;
    I see the true arenas of my race–or first, or last,
    Man’s innocent and strong arenas.

    I see the Heroes at other toils;
    I see, well-wielded in their hands, the better weapons. 100

    I see where America, Mother of All,
    Well-pleased, with full-spanning eye, gazes forth, dwells long,
    And counts the varied gathering of the products.

    Busy the far, the sunlit panorama;
    Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North,
    Cotton and rice of the South, and Louisianian cane;
    Open, unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy,
    Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine,
    And many a stately river flowing, and many a jocund brook,
    And healthy uplands with their herby-perfumed breezes, 110
    And the good green grass–that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring
    grass.

    Toil on, Heroes! harvest the products!
    Not alone on those warlike fields, the Mother of All,
    With dilated form and lambent eyes, watch’d you.

    Toil on, Heroes! toil well! Handle the weapons well!
    The Mother of All–yet here, as ever, she watches you.

    Well-pleased, America, thou beholdest,
    Over the fields of the West, those crawling monsters,
    The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements:
    Beholdest, moving in every direction, imbued as with life, the
    revolving hay-rakes, 120
    The steam-power reaping-machines, and the horse-power machines,
    The engines, thrashers of grain, and cleaners of grain, well
    separating the straw–the nimble work of the patent pitch-fork;
    Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the rice-
    cleanser.

    Beneath thy look, O Maternal,
    With these, and else, and with their own strong hands, the Heroes
    harvest.

    All gather, and all harvest;
    (Yet but for thee, O Powerful! not a scythe might swing, as now, in
    security;
    Not a maize-stalk dangle, as now, its silken tassels in peace.)

    Under Thee only they harvest–even but a wisp of hay, under thy great
    face, only;
    Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin–every barbed spear,
    under thee; 130
    Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee–each ear in its
    light-green sheath,
    Gather the hay to its myriad mows, in the odorous, tranquil barns,
    Oats to their bins–the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to
    theirs;
    Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama–dig and hoard the
    golden, the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas,
    Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania,
    Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp, or tobacco in the
    Borders,
    Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees, or bunches
    of grapes from the vines,
    Or aught that ripens in all These States, or North or South,
    Under the beaming sun, and under Thee.

     

     

    A Man Young And Old Poem by William Butler Yeats

    I
    First Love

    Though nurtured like the sailing moon
    In beauty’s murderous brood,
    She walked awhile and blushed awhile
    And on my pathway stood
    Until I thought her body bore
    A heart of flesh and blood.
    But since I laid a hand thereon
    And found a heart of stone
    I have attempted many things
    And not a thing is done,
    For every hand is lunatic
    That travels on the moon.
    She smiled and that transfigured me
    And left me but a lout,
    Maundering here, and maundering there,
    Emptier of thought
    Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
    When the moon sails out.

    II
    Human Dignity
    Like the moon her kindness is,
    If kindness I may call
    What has no comprehension in’t,
    But is the same for all
    As though my sorrow were a scene
    Upon a painted wall.
    So like a bit of stone I lie
    Under a broken tree.
    I could recover if I shrieked
    My heart’s agony
    To passing bird, but I am dumb
    From human dignity.

    III
    The Mermaid
    A mermaid found a swimming lad,
    Picked him for her own,
    Pressed her body to his body,
    Laughed; and plunging down
    Forgot in cruel happiness
    That even lovers drown.

    IV
    The Death of the Hare
    I have pointed out the yelling pack,
    The hare leap to the wood,
    And when I pass a compliment
    Rejoice as lover should
    At the drooping of an eye,
    At the mantling of the blood.
    Then’ suddenly my heart is wrung
    By her distracted air
    And I remember wildness lost
    And after, swept from there,
    Am set down standing in the wood
    At the death of the hare.

    V
    The Empty Cup
    A crazy man that found a cup,
    When all but dead of thirst,
    Hardly dared to wet his mouth
    Imagining, moon-accursed,
    That another mouthful
    And his beating heart would burst.
    October last I found it too
    But found it dry as bone,
    And for that reason am I crazed
    And my sleep is gone.

    VI
    His Memories
    We should be hidden from their eyes,
    Being but holy shows
    And bodies broken like a thorn
    Whereon the bleak north blows,
    To think of buried Hector
    And that none living knows.
    The women take so little stock
    In what I do or say
    They’d sooner leave their cosseting
    To hear a jackass bray;
    My arms are like the twisted thorn
    And yet there beauty lay;
    The first of all the tribe lay there
    And did such pleasure take –
    She who had brought great Hector down
    And put all Troy to wreck –
    That she cried into this ear,
    ‘Strike me if I shriek.’

    VII
    The Friends of his Youth
    Laughter not time destroyed my voice
    And put that crack in it,
    And when the moon’s pot-bellied
    I get a laughing fit,
    For that old Madge comes down the lane,
    A stone upon her breast,
    And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
    And she can get no rest
    With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
    She that has been wild
    And barren as a breaking wave
    Thinks that the stone’s a child.
    And Peter that had great affairs
    And was a pushing man
    Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’
    And perches on a stone;
    And then I laugh till tears run down
    And the heart thumps at my side,
    Remembering that her shriek was love
    And that he shrieks from pride.

    VIII
    Summer and Spring
    We sat under an old thorn-tree
    And talked away the night,
    Told all that had been said or done
    Since first we saw the light,
    And when we talked of growing up
    Knew that we’d halved a soul
    And fell the one in t’other’s arms
    That we might make it whole;
    Then peter had a murdering look,
    For it seemed that he and she
    Had spoken of their childish days
    Under that very tree.
    O what a bursting out there was,
    And what a blossoming,
    When we had all the summer-time
    And she had all the spring!

    IX
    The Secrets of the Old
    I have old women’s sectets now
    That had those of the young;
    Madge tells me what I dared not think
    When my blood was strong,
    And what had drowned a lover once
    Sounds like an old song.
    Though Margery is stricken dumb
    If thrown in Madge’s way,
    We three make up a solitude;
    For none alive to-day
    Can know the stories that we know
    Or say the things we say:
    How such a man pleased women most
    Of all that are gone,
    How such a pair loved many years
    And such a pair but one,
    Stories of the bed of straw
    Or the bed of down.

    X
    His Wildness
    O bid me mount and sail up there
    Amid the cloudy wrack,
    For peg and Meg and Paris’ love
    That had so straight a back,
    Are gone away, and some that stay
    Have changed their silk for sack.
    Were I but there and none to hear
    I’d have a peacock cry,
    For that is natural to a man
    That lives in memory,
    Being all alone I’d nurse a stone
    And sing it lullaby.

    XI
    From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’
    Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
    Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
    Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
    Even from that delight memory treasures so,
    Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
    As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
    In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
    The bride is catried to the bridegroom’s chamber
    through torchlight and tumultuous song;
    I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
    Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
    Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
    looked into the eye of day;
    The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

     

     

    A Fishy Tale Poem by Vanessa Hughes

    I saw you twice the other day
    Stirring passion anew
    It’s easy saying just move on
    Less easier to do

    Ive always said to others
    There’s plenty more fish in the sea
    But some days it makes no difference
    How many fish there be

    On the face of it, a small fish
    But you took over my whole sea
    Never before had I gone fishing
    It was all so new to me

    You were someone that I longed for
    I’d never felt like that before
    Some months on, now I’m seeing
    The sea has fish once more

    But some days you’re the only fish
    Swimming in my sea
    And the fervor that you stirred in me
    Will forever be