It's Been a While Since They Asked

I
It's been a while since they asked, Who lives in between these
houses,
And who was he, the last of the last to speak,
And who forgot his coat between these houses,
And who was the one who stayed. Why didn't he flee?

Among the blossomers, a dead tree stands, dead tree.
A long-standing error, a misunderstanding of yore,
The edge of the Land, where an era begins to be
For somebody else. A bit of stillness there.

And the current events of body and of hell,
The reeds of the end, their spells of sway and sough.
The wind passed on its way through that locale
And a serious dog saw the humans laugh.
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Air and Angels by John Donne
John Donne
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Read Poem
0
152
Rating:

O Ye Tongues by Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
First Psalm

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you.

Let there be an earth with a form like a jigsaw and let it fit for all of ye.

Let there be the darkness of a darkroom out of the deep. A worm room.

Let there be a God who sees light at the end of a long thin pipe and lets it in.

Let God divide them in half.

Let God share his Hoodsie.

Let the waters divide so that God may wash his face in first light.
Read Poem
0
149
Rating:

from “Poems to Czechoslovakia” by Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Black mountain

black mountain
blocks the earth’s light.
Time—time—time
to give back to God his ticket.

I refuse to—be. In
the madhouse of the inhumans
I refuse to—live. To swim
Read Poem
0
95
Rating:

The Beasts' Confession by Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
To the Priest, on Observing how most Men mistake their own Talents When beasts could speak (the learned say,
They still can do so ev'ry day),
It seems, they had religion then,
As much as now we find in men.
Read Poem
0
146
Rating:

A Prospect of Heaven Makes Death Easy by Isaac Watts
Isaac Watts
There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.

There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers;
Death like a narrow sea divides
This heavenly land from ours.

Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green:
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.

Read Poem
0
102
Rating:

from Georgics, III by Virgil
Virgil
Thus every Creature, and of every Kind,
The secret Joys of sweet Coition find:
Not only Man’s Imperial Race; but they
That wing the liquid Air, or swim the Sea,
Or haunt the Desert, rush into the flame:
For Love is Lord of all; and is in all the same.
’Tis with this rage, the Mother Lion stung,
Scours o’re the Plain; regardless of her young:
Read Poem
0
115
Rating:

The Life of Lincoln West by Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks
Ugliest little boy
that everyone ever saw.
That is what everyone said.

Even to his mother it was apparent—
when the blue-aproned nurse came into the
northeast end of the maternity ward
bearing his squeals and plump bottom
looped up in a scant receiving blanket,
Read Poem
0
212
Rating:

Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet by Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,
Our embargo's off at last;
Favourable breezes blowing
Bend the canvass o'er the mast.
From aloft the signal's streaming,
Hark! the farewell gun is fir'd;
Women screeching, tars blaspheming,
Tell us that our time's expir'd.
Read Poem
0
111
Rating:

Voyages by Hart Crane
Hart Crane
I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
Read Poem
0
132
Rating:

Dream-Land by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Read Poem
0
240
Rating:

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
1.

Far from the sea far from the sea
of Breton fishermen
the white clouds scudding
over Lowell
and the white birches the
bare white birches
along the blear night roads
Read Poem
0
144
Rating:

from The Testament of John Lydgate by John Lydgate
John Lydgate
Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see
What mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace.
With pietous voys I crye and sey to the:
Beholde my woundes, behold my blody face,
Beholde the rebukes that do me so manace,
Beholde my enemyes that do me so despice,
And how that I, to reforme the to grace,
Was like a lambe offred in sacryfice.

...

And geyn thi pryde behold my gret mekenesse;
Geyn thyn envie behold my charité;
Geyn thi leccherye behold my chast clennesse;
Geyn thi covetyse behold my poverté.
Read Poem
0
156
Rating:

January 22nd, Missolonghi by Lord Byron (George Gordon)
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
Read Poem
0
91
Rating:

I Dreamed That I Was Old by Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz
I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.

My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found
Itself tart recompense for what was lost
In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground
Has no apocalypse or pentecost.
Read Poem
0
118
Rating:

“No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved” by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.

Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.

Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,
so easily do they break.

You are a laconic marksman. You leave me
not dead but perpetually dying.
Read Poem
0
118
Rating:

Felix Randal by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
Read Poem
0
115
Rating:

‘The Moon came late’ by Mary Mapes Dodge
Mary Mapes Dodge
The moon came late to a lonesome bog,
And there sat Goggleky Gluck, the frog.
‘My stars!’ she cried, and veiled her face,
‘What very grand people they have in this place!’

Read Poem
0
121
Rating:

Incidents of Travel in Poetry by Frank Lima
Frank Lima
Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy
and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became
Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the
steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants
Read Poem
0
137
Rating:

Floating Island by Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth
Harmonious Powers with Nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake, and sea:
Sunshine and storm, whirlwind and breeze
All in one duteous task agree.

Once did I see a slip of earth,
By throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed from its hold; — how no one knew
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind.

Might see it, from the mossy shore
Dissevered float upon the Lake,
Float, with its crest of trees adorned
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.

Read Poem
0
110
Rating:

Song by Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Stranger, you who hide my love
In the curved cheek of a smile
And sleep with her upon a tongue
Of soft lies that beguile,
Your paradisal ecstasy
Is justified is justified
By hunger of the beasts beneath
The overhanging cloud
Read Poem
0
127
Rating: