AMERICA POEMS

Freedom's Plow

When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
.....

Langston Hughes

Song At Sunset

Splendor of ended day, floating and filling me!
Hour prophetic-hour resuming the past!
Inflating my throat-you, divine average!
You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing.
.....

Walt Whitman

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
.....

Langston Hughes

I Hear America Singing

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics-each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
.....

Walt Whitman

The Age Of The Antonines

While faith forecasts millennial years
Spite Europe's embattled lines,
Back to the Past one glance be cast-
The Age of the Antonines!
.....

Herman Melville

Candles

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
.....

Sylvia Plath

America In 1904

(Europe Conquers America.)

Strong for the strong and in his own conceit;
Half-boy, half-madman, playing with the fire;
.....

Edgar Lee Masters

Fear Is What Quickens Me

1

Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
.....

James Arlington Wright

A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir

Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
.....

Delmore Schwartz

Ruth

When Ruth was left half desolate,
Her Father took another Mate;
And Ruth, not seven years old,
A slighted child, at her own will
.....

William Wordsworth

America The Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
.....

Katharine Lee Bates

With All Thy Gifts, America

With all thy gifts, America,
(Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,)
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee, With these, and like of these, vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving;)
.....

Walt Whitman

The Greatest Thing In North America

This is the greatest thing in North America:
Europe is the greatest thing in North America!
High in the sky, dark in the heart, and always there
Among the natural powers of sunlight and of air,
.....

Delmore Schwartz

Columbus

Once upon a time there was an Italian,
And some people thought he was a rapscallion,
But he wasn't offended,
Because other people thought he was splendid,
.....

Ogden Nash

Ploughing On Sunday

The white cock's tail
Tosses in the wind.
The turkey-cock's tail
Glitters in the sun.
.....

Wallace Stevens

Money

An introductory lecture


This morning we shall spend a few minutes
.....

Howard Nemerov

A Farewel To America

I.
Adieu, New-England's smiling meads,
Adieu, the flow'ry plain:
I leave thine op'ning charms, O spring,
.....

Phillis Wheatley

Salut Au Monde

O TAKE my hand, Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next!
Each answering all--each sharing the earth with all.
.....

Walt Whitman

Full Flight

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
.....

Bob Hicok

Ode On Venice

I.
Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
.....

George Gordon Byron

God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
.....

Harold Pinter

America

Once in English they said America. Was it English to them.
Once they said Belgian.
We like a fog.
Do you for weather.
.....

Gertrude Stein

Long, Too Long America

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,
.....

Walt Whitman

Everywhere In America

Not somewhere in America, but everywhere to-day,
Where snow-crowned mountains hold their heads,
the vales where children play,
Beside the bench and whirring lathe, on every
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

America

God has been good to men. He gave
His Only Son their souls to save,
And then he made a second gift,
Which from their dreary lives should lift
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

America, America!

I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it,
the lights, the stars, and the bridges
I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic
-of the peoples' hearts, crossing it
.....

Delmore Schwartz

To America

How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking 'neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?
.....

James Weldon Johnson

He Did Love

He did love three things in this world:
Choir chants at vespers, albino peacocks,
And worn, weathered maps of America.
And he did not love children crying,
.....

Anna Akhmatova

Kissass

Kissass is the Part of Peace
America will have to Kissass Mother Earth
Whites have to Kissass blacks, for Peace & Pleasure,
Only Pathway to Peace, Kissass.
.....

Allen Ginsberg

Exquisite Candidate

I can promise you this: food in the White House
will change! No more granola, only fried eggs
flipped the way we like them. And ham ham ham!
Americans need ham! Nothing airy like debate for me!
.....

Denise Duhamel

Behavior

BEHAVIOR--fresh, native, copious, each one for himself or herself,
Nature and the Soul expressed--America and freedom expressed--In it
the finest art,
In it pride, cleanliness, sympathy, to have their chance,
.....

Walt Whitman

States!

STATES!
Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

.....

Walt Whitman

Ode To Maize

America, from a grain
of maize you grew
to crown
with spacious lands
.....

Pablo Neruda

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
.....

Claude Mckay

To The Saguaro Cactus Tree In The Desert Rain

I had no idea the elf owl
Crept into you in the secret
Of night.

.....

James Arlington Wright

To The Saguaro Cactus Tree In The Desert Rain

I had no idea the elf owl
Crept into you in the secret
Of night.

.....

To The Saguaro Cactus Tree In The Desert Rain Poe

Pane Caldo

Rising in the morning
like warm bread,
from a bed
in America,
.....

Erica Jong

To A Kindly Critic

If it's wrong to believe in the land that we love
And to pray for Our Flag to the good God above;
If it's wrong to believe that Our Country is best;
That honor's her standard, and truth is her crest;
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

An Old Man's Thought Of School

An old man's thought of School;
An old man, gathering youthful memories and blooms, that youth itself cannot.

Now only do I know you!
.....

Walt Whitman

The New Year

Come you with dangers to fright us? or hazards
to try out our souls?
Then may you find us undaunted; determined to
get to our goals.
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

A Sad State Of Freedom

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
.....

Nazim Hikmet

Song Of The Coffle Gang

This song is said to be sung by Slaves, as they are chained in gangs,
when parting from friends for the far off South-children taken from
parents, husbands from wives, and brothers from sisters.

.....

Anonymous Americas

Bus East

Society has good intentions Bureaucracy is like a friend
5 years ago - other furies other losses -

America's
.....

Jack Kerouac

To The Republicans Of North America

I.
Brothers! between you and me
Whirlwinds sweep and billows roar:
Yet in spirit oft I see
.....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

So Long

TO conclude--I announce what comes after me;
I announce mightier offspring, orators, days, and then, for the
present, depart.

.....

Walt Whitman

Fellow Citizens

I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
.....

Carl Sandburg

Karen

At her low quaint wheel she sits to spin,
Deftly drawing the long, light rolls
Of carded wool through her finders thin,
By the fireside at the Isles of Shoals.
.....

Celia Thaxter

Crossing Nation

Under silver wing
San Francisco's towers sprouting
thru thin gas clouds,
Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure
.....

Allen Ginsberg

America

I
Where the wings of a sunny Dome expand
I saw a Banner in gladsome air-
Starry, like Berenice's Hair-
.....

Herman Melville

Elegy Xix: To His Mistress Going To Bed

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
.....

John Donne