BRANCH POEMS

Into The Golden Vessel Of Great Song

Into the golden vessel of great song
Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast
Let other lovers lie, in love and rest;
Not we,-articulate, so, but with the tongue
.....

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Remembrance To Forget

at the edge of a branch
i once slipped off,
an invisible noose
held on to the remains
.....

Ekta Somera

Excelsior

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device-
.....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Pear Tree

Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.
.....

Hilda Doolittle

Endymion: Book I

ENDYMION.

A Poetic Romance.

.....

John Keats

Poems For Piraye (9 To 10 O-clock Poems)

Remembering you is good
in prison
amid the news
of victory and death
.....

Nazim Hikmet

The Englishman In Italy

(PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
.....

Robert Browning

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
.....

T. S. Eliot

Prothalamion

Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre
Sweete-breathing Zephyrus did softly play
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titans beames, which then did glyster fayre;
.....

Edmund Spenser

The Flower And The Leaf: Or, The Lady In The Arbour.[1]

A VISION.


Now turning from the wintry signs, the sun,
.....

John Dryden

The Italian In England

That second time they hunted me
From hill to plain, from shore to sea,
And Austria, hounding far and wide
Her blood-hounds through the countryside,
.....

Robert Browning

The Carrier's Story Or, Brighten's Sister-in-law

At a point where the old road crosses
The river, and turns to the right,
I'd camped with the team; and the hosses
Was all fixed up for the night.
.....

Henry Lawson

All Roads That Lead To God Are Good

All roads that lead to God are good.
What matters it, your faith, or mine?
Both centre at the goal divine
Of love's eternal Brotherhood.
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Endymion: Book Iii

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
.....

John Keats

A Celebration

A middle-northern March, now as always-
gusts from the South broken against cold winds-
but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide,
it moves-not into April-into a second March,
.....

William Carlos Williams

Climbing

High up in the apple tree climbing I go,
With the sky above me, the earth below.
Each branch is the step of a wonderful stair
Which leads to the town I see shining up there.
.....

Amy Lowell

An Octopus

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
.....

Marianne Moore

The Spring

Cydonian Spring with her attendant train,
Maelids and water-girls,
Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,
Throughout this sylvan place
.....

Ezra Pound

You Who Wronged

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,
.....

Czeslaw Milosz

Love Compared

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Nizar Qabbani

Easter-day

HOW very hard it is to be
A Christian! Hard for you and me,
â??Not the mere task of making real
That duty up to its ideal,
.....

Robert Browning

I Have Come To You Delighted

I have come to you, delighted,
To tell you that sun has risen,
That its light has warmly started
To fulfil on leaves its dancing;
.....

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet

The Key (a Moorish Romance)

'On the east coast, towards Tunis, the Moors still preserve the key of their ancestors' houses in Spain; to which country they still express the hopes of one day returning and again planting the crescent on the ancient walls of the Alhambra.'
â??Scott's
Travels in Morocco and Algiers.

.....

Thomas Hood

We Learned

The decorum of fire...
-- Pablo Neruda

We learned the decorum of fire,
.....

Erica Jong

Shadow

Here you are beside me again
Memories of my companions killed in the war
The olive-branch of time
Memories that make only a single memory
.....

Guillaume Apollinaire

The Generations Of Men

A governor it was proclaimed this time,
When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire
Ancestral memories might come together.
And those of the name Stark gathered in Bow,
.....

Robert Frost

Tannhauser

To my mother. May, 1870.


The Landgrave Hermann held a gathering
.....

Emma Lazarus

Home

A home above the year's seasons
home of children animals and apples
a square of empty space
under an absent star
.....

Zbigniew Herbert

Branch Library

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
.....

Edward Hirsch

Sheltered Garden

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
.....

H. D.

The Wanderings Of Oisin: Book I

S. Patrick. You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
.....

William Butler Yeats

Talking In Their Sleep

“You think I am dead,”
The apple tree said,
“Because I have never a leaf to show-
Because I stoop,
.....

Edith M. Thomas

At The Gate

The monastery towers, as pure and fair
As virgin vows, reached up white hands to Heaven;
The walls, to guard the hidden heart of prayer,
Were strong as sin, and white as sin forgiven;
.....

E. (edith) Nesbit

Song (o Roses For The Flush Of Youth)

O roses for the flush of youth,
And laurel for the perfect prime;
But pluck an ivy branch for me
Grown old before my time.
.....

Christina Rossetti

Meg's Curse

The sun rode high in a cloudless sky
Of a perfect summer morn.
She stood and gazed out into the street,
And wondered why she was born.
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Frost At Midnight

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,
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When Night Comes

To the tune of "Telling My Most Intimate Feelings"

When night comes,
I am so flushed with wine,
.....

Li Ching Chao

To Winter

Stay, season of calm love and soulful snows!
There is a subtle sweetness in the sun,
The ripples on the stream's breast gaily run,
The wind more boisterously by me blows,
.....

Claude Mckay

Ecstasy

I am in front of this feminine land
Like a child in front of the fire
Smiling vaguely with tears in my eyes
In front of this land where all moves in me
.....

Paul Eluard

Winter Scene

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
.....

Archie Randolph Ammons

The Wanderer

To see the clouds his spirit yearned toward so
Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves,
Back of old-storied spires and architraves
To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,
.....

Alan Seeger

Faerie

From the oped lattice glance once more abroad
While the ethereal moontide bathes with light
Hill, stream, and garden, and white-winding road.

.....

Emma Lazarus

November

As I walk the misty hill
All is languid, fogged, and still;
Not a note of any bird
Nor any motion's hint is heard,
.....

Robert Nichols

The Sprig Of Lime

He lay, and those who watched him were amazed
To see unheralded beneath the lids
Twin tears, new-gathered at the price of pain,
Start and at once run crookedly athwart
.....

Robert Nichols

Wilfred

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John Le Gay Brereton

Atavism

1
Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
.....

William Stafford

Quan L'herba Fresqu'el.h Folha

Can l'erba fresch'e.lh folha par
e la flors boton'el verjan
e.l rossinhols autet e clar
leva sa vots e mou so chan,
.....

Bernard De Ventadorn

Town Owl

On eves of cold, when slow coal fires,
rooted in basements, burn and branch,
brushing with smoke the city air;
When quartered moons pale in the sky,
.....

Laurie Lee

The Ardennes Forest

Cup your hands to scoop up sleep
as you would draw a grain of water
and the forest will come: a green cloud
a birch trunk like a chord of light
.....

Zbigniew Herbert

Prayer

White, O white faceâ??
from disenchanted days
wither alike dark rose
and fiery bays:
.....

Hilda Doolittle