Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

'Here's a nut, there's a nut;
Hide it quick away,
In a hole, under leaves,
To eat some winter day.
Acorns sweet are plenty,
We will have them all:
Skip and scamper lively
Till the last ones fall.'
...

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant

...

Why do you walk through blazing fires
To get to the other side
Where the sky admires
The land down below
Where flowers grow and rivers flow
Where deer run
Under the blazing sun
And the birds glide
Flapping with all their might
Near the swaying trees

...

Thou Christ of mine, Thy gracious ear low bending
Through these glad New Year days,
To catch the countless prayers to heaven ascending –
For e’en hard hearts do raise
Some secret wish for fame, or gold, or power,
Or freedom from all care –
Dear, patient Christ, who listeneth hour on hour,
Hear now a Christian’s prayer.

Let this young year, silent, walks beside me,
Be as a means of grace
To lead me up, no matter what betide me,
Nearer the Master’s face.
If it need be ere I reach the Fountain
Where living waters play,
My feet should bleed from sharp stones on the mountain,
Then cast them in my way.

If my vain soul needs blows and bitter losses
To shape it for Thy crown,
Then bruise it, burn it, burden it with crosses,
With sorrows bear it down.
Do what Thou wilt to mould me to Thy pleasure,
And if I should complain,
Heap full of anguish yet another measure
Until I smile at pain.
Send dangers – deaths! but tell me how to dare them;
Enfold me in Thy care.
Send trials, tears! but give me strength to bear them –
This is a Christian’s prayer.
...

A lone gray bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,
Out into the gloom it swings and batters,
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,

...

I bled for you,
While you kept asking for more.
No matter how hard we tried
To build something worth fighting for.

I dreamed of growth,
Of love that would endure,
But you kept tearing down
What I was trying to secure.


...

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

...

Sons of the mountains of Scotland,
Welshmen of coomb and defile,
Breed of the moors of England,
Children of Erin's green isle,
We stand four square to the tempest,
Whatever the battering hail-
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.

Our women shall walk in honour,

...

You and I felt like two different worlds,
yet fate has always had a taste for strange things.
When we first met,
I thought we'd simply pass through each other's lives.

Then time quietly closed the distance.
Small conversations became habits.
I learned how to wait for someone,
and how to care without needing a reason.


...