Queer People

Q
The people people work with best
Are often very queer
The people people own by birth
Quite shock your first idea;
The people people choose for friends
Your common sense appall,
But the people people marry
Are the queerest folks of all.

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Doctor Meyers by Edgar Lee Masters
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Heart’s Needle by W. D. Snodgrass
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Paradise Lost: Book 10 (1674 version) by John Milton
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From “Five Poems” by Edward Dahlberg
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I
He who has never tasted the grapes of Canaan can only view them from Pisgah.

I have my tides, O sea-foamed Venus, dearer than watercress, pipkins, thyme and clymene. You once held me by the cord of my navel, but I have not died to live in Mahomet’s paradise.

Would that I could gather up my love to me as one does one’s fate, or measure her nature as God does the sea.

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I shed tears on the Mount of Olives because people no longer care for each other, but my friends have lacked the character for the vigil. There is no Cana wine in human affections that are not always awake, for people who do not trouble about each other are foes.

It is humiliating being the lamb and bleating to each passerby, “Feed me!” What is the use of saying that men are stones when I know I am going to try to turn them into bread.

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60
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