Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

Unhappy sight, and hath she vanish'd by
So near, in so good time, so free a place?
Dead glass, dost thou thy object so embrace,
As what my heart still sees thou canst not spy?

I swear by her I love and lack, that I
Was not in fault, who bend thy dazzling race
Only unto the heav'n of Stella's face,
Counting but dust what in the way did lie.

But cease, mine eyes; your tears do witness well
That you, guiltless thereof, your nectar miss'd:
Curs'd be the page from whom the bad torch fell.

Curs'd be the night which did your strife resist,
Curs'd be the coachman which did drive so fast,
With no worse curse than absence makes me taste.
...

These fine days have been my ruin.
On this kind of day I resigned
My job in 'Pious Foundations'
On this kind of day I started to smoke
On this kind of day I fell in love
On this kind of day I forgot
To bring home bread and salt
On this kind of day I had a relapse
Into my versifying disease.
These fine days have been my ruin.

...

I stand where gold remembers prayer,
where quiet climbs the edges of the sky.
The temple does not speak--
it listens… and so do I.

The day starts quietly here,
stone looks worn but steady.
I stand off to the side - away from the light,
and stand there longer than planned.


...

Here's a health to every sportsman, be he stableman or lord,
If his heart be true, I care not what his pocket may afford;
And may he ever pleasantly each gallant sport pursue,
If he takes his liquor fairly, and his fences fairly, too.

He cares not for the bubbles of Fortune's fickle tide,
Who like Bendigo can battle, and like Olliver can ride.
He laughs at those who caution, at those who chide he'll frown,
As he clears a five-foot paling, or he knocks a peeler down.

The dull, cold world may blame us, boys! but what care we the while,
If coral lips will cheer us, and bright eyes on us smile?
For beauty's fond caresses can most tenderly repay
The weariness and trouble of many an anxious day.

Then fill your glass, and drain it, too, with all your heart and soul,
To the best of sports — The Fox-hunt, The Fair Ones, and The Bowl,
To a stout heart in adversity through every ill to steer,
And when Fortune smiles a score of friends like those around us here
...

not of silver nor of coral,
but of weatherbeaten laurel.

Here, he introduced a sea
uniform like tapestry;

here, a fig-tree; there, a face;
there, a dragon circling space --

designating here, a bower;

...

deleted
...

GALLUS

This now, the very latest of my toils,
Vouchsafe me, Arethusa! needs must I
Sing a brief song to Gallus- brief, but yet
Such as Lycoris' self may fitly read.
Who would not sing for Gallus? So, when thou
Beneath Sicanian billows glidest on,
May Doris blend no bitter wave with thine,
Begin! The love of Gallus be our theme,
And the shrewd pangs he suffered, while, hard by,
The flat-nosed she-goats browse the tender brush.
We sing not to deaf ears; no word of ours
But the woods echo it. What groves or lawns
Held you, ye Dryad-maidens, when for love-
Love all unworthy of a loss so dear-
Gallus lay dying? for neither did the slopes
Of Pindus or Parnassus stay you then,
No, nor Aonian Aganippe. Him
Even the laurels and the tamarisks wept;
For him, outstretched beneath a lonely rock,
Wept pine-clad Maenalus, and the flinty crags
Of cold Lycaeus. The sheep too stood around-
Of us they feel no shame, poet divine;
Nor of the flock be thou ashamed: even fair
Adonis by the rivers fed his sheep-
Came shepherd too, and swine-herd footing slow,
And, from the winter-acorns dripping-wet
Menalcas. All with one accord exclaim:
'From whence this love of thine?' Apollo came;

...

It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.

...

The city hums like a restless heart,
steel veins carrying the pulse of strangers
who dream in fragments—
coffee cups, subway echoes,
screens glowing with promises
too fragile to hold.

I pause at the corner,
watching a mural peel into memory,
colors fading but still defiant,

...