AQUARIUM POEMS

Privacy

Oh you who are shy of the popular eye,
(Though most of us seek to survive it)
Just think of the goldfish who wanted to die
Because she could never be private.
.....

Robert Service

Towns In Colour

I

Red Slippers

.....

Amy Lowell

The Reef

My green aquarium of phantom fish,
Goggling in on me through the misty panes;
My rotting leaves and fields spongy with rains;
My few clear quiet autumn days- I wish
.....

Aldous Huxley

Aquarium Fish

MOULD-COLOURED like the leaf long fallen from
The autumn branch, he rises now, the Fish.
The cold eyes of the gannets see their rock:
He has No-whither. Who was it marked
.....

Padraic Colum

An Aquarium

Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,
Silver shiftings,
Rings veering out of rings,
Silver-gold-
.....

Amy Lowell

That Bright Chimeric Beast

That bright chimeric beast
Conceived yet never born,
Save in the poet's breast,
The white-flanked unicorn,
.....

Countee Cullen

The Aquarium

One fine morning
I went to a fish store
And bought tropical fishes
In their brightest striking hues
.....

Rose Marie Juan Austin

The Tongue

Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed
her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It
brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls
of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.
.....

Zbigniew Herbert

Sun-rhapsody

The Sun! the Sun!
a fish in the aquarium of sky
or golden net to snare the butterfly
of soul
.....

Harry Crosby

Privacy

Oh you who are shy of the popular eye,
(Though most of us seek to survive it)
Just think of the goldfish who wanted to die
Because she could never be private.
.....

Robert William Service

Face In The Window

I am a modest house, a house solely
notable for the fact I lived here once.
Its brass plaque depicts an oxygen eye
in which two pupils of hydrogen dance.
.....

Bill Knott

Five Bells

he flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
.....

Kenneth Slessor

The Microscopic Trout And The Machiavelian Fisherman

A fisher was casting his flies in a brook,
According to laws of such sciences,
With a patented reel and a patented hook
And a number of other appliances;
.....

Guy Wetmore Carryl

The Reef

My green aquarium of phantom fish,
Goggling in on me through the misty panes;
My rotting leaves and fields spongy with rains;
My few clear quiet autumn days--I wish
.....

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Rivers And Streams (prose)

Running water has a charm all its own; it proffers companionship of which one never tires; it adapts itself to moods; it is the guardian of secrets. It has cool draughts for the thirsty soul as well as for drooping flowers; and they who wander in the garden of God with listening ears learn of its many voices.

When the strain of a working day has left me weary, perhaps troubled and perplexed, I find my way to the river. I step into a boat and pull up stream until the exertion has refreshed me; and then I make fast to the old alder-stump where last year the reed- piper nested, and lie back in the stern and think.

.....

Michael Fairless

Blue And Red: Or, The Discontented Lobster

Permit me, Reader, to make my bow,
And allow
Me to humbly commend to your tender mercies
The hero of these simple verses.
.....

Juliana Horatia Ewing

My Goldfish

Swim, swim, swim, my goldfish love to swim
Day and night they just swim around and play
Four single tail goldfish in 35 gallons of rainwater
One of them is orange and gold with black fins
.....

Marlon Pitter