SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
ONE
Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night
And she made all of light,
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
