FENCE POEMS

The African Child

Oh! African child
Today is your day
We all gathered
To celebrate you
.....

Ola Olawale

Studio Composition

Cup of Words

Crystal sphere sitting
Before child like statue
.....

Joseph Mayo Wristen

One Day ( Like August 5)

One Day
Though it may be years unknown
We shall over come
And our land will be free
.....

Ola Olawale

Tears On The Road To Nairobi

The pen left in hurry
And the brain waved at noon
At the hour the country home
Rig and kill for power and self
.....

Ola Olawale

The Old Huntsman

I've never ceased to curse the day I signed
A seven years' bargain for the Golden Fleece.
'Twas a bad deal all round; and dear enough
It cost me, what with my daft management,
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

In Me, Past, Present, Future Meet

In me, past, present, future meet
To hold long chiding conference.
My lusts usurp the present tense
And strangle Reason in his seat.
.....

Siegfried Sassoon

Reconstruction

So, the bank has bust it's boiler! And in six or seven year
It will pay me all my money back -- of course!
But the horse will perish waiting while the grass is germinating,
And I reckon I'll be something like the horse.
.....

Banjo Paterson

Very Many People

On the Downs, in the Weald, on the Marshes,
I heard the Old Gods say:
"Here come Very Many People:
"We must go away.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Night Golf

I remember the night I discovered,
lying in bed in the dark,
that a few imagined holes of golf
worked much better than a thousand sheep,
.....

Billy Collins

Religio Laici

Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,
Is reason to the soul; and as on high,
Those rolling fires discover but the sky
.....

John Dryden

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
.....

Donald Justice

There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
.....

Sara Teasdale

The Flower And The Leaf: Or, The Lady In The Arbour.[1]

A VISION.


Now turning from the wintry signs, the sun,
.....

John Dryden

The Wizard Way

[Dedicated to General J.C.F. Fuller]

Velvet soft the night-star glowed
Over the untrodden road,
.....

Aleister Crowley

The Lay Of The Laborer

A spade! a rake! a hoe!
A pickaxe, or a bill!
A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow,
A flail, or what ye willâ??
.....

Thomas Hood

Youth And Art

1 It once might have been, once only:
2 We lodged in a street together,
3 You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
4 I, a lone she-bird of his feather.
.....

Robert Browning

The Great Hunger

I
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
.....

Patrick Kavanagh

Zero

The gate, on ice-hoarse hinges, stiff with frost,
Croaks open; and harsh wagon-wheels are heard
Creaking through cold; the horses' breath is furred
Around their nostrils; and with snow deep mossed
.....

Madison Julius Cawein

The Nine Little Goblins

They all climbed up on a high board-fence--
Nine little Goblins, with green-glass eyes--
Nine little Goblins that had no sense,
And couldn't tell coppers from cold mince pies;
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

Hydrangeas

Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas
turn rust and go soon.
Already mid September a line of brown runs
over them.
.....

Carl Sandburg

The Centaurs

Up came the young Centaur-colts from the plains they were
fathered in--
Curious, awkward, afraid.
Burrs on their hocks and their tails, they were branded and gathered in
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Love

Twice I awoke this night, and went
to the window. The streetlamps were
a fragment of a sentence spoken in sleep,
leading to nothing, like omission points,
.....

Joseph Brodsky

To A Bower.

Three times, sweet hawthorn! I have met thy bower,
And thou hast gain'd my love, and I do feel
An aching pain to leave thee: every flower
Around thee opening doth new charms reveal,
.....

John Clare

The Race

On the hill they are crowding together,
In the stand they are crushing for room,
Like midge-flies they swarm on the heather,
They gather like bees on the broom;
.....

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Letters To The Roman Friend

From Martial
Now is windy and the waves are cresting over
Fall is soon to come to change the place entirely.
Change of colors moves me, Postum, even stronger
.....

Joseph Brodsky

Thomas The Pretender

Tommy's alluz playin' jokes,
An' actin' up, an' foolin' folks;
An' wunst one time he creep
In Pa's big chair, he did, one night,
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

Song Of The Old Guard

'And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same . . . .

'And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the same, according to the six ranches that proceed out of the candlestick . . . . Their knops and their branches shall be of the same.' - Exodus.

.....

Rudyard Kipling

The Deserted Village

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visits paid,
And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed:
.....

Oliver Goldsmith

Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
.....

Gregory Corso

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

Roosters

At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock

.....

Elizabeth Bishop

Home Burial

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
.....

Robert Frost

Comus

A Masque Presented At Ludlow Castle, 1634, Before

The Earl Of Bridgewater, Then President Of Wales.

.....

John Milton

Miss Edith Makes Another Friend

Oh, you're the girl lives on the corner? Come in-if you want to-
come quick!
There's no one but me in the house, and the cook-but she's only a
stick.
.....

Bret Harte

Don Pedrillo

Not a lad in Saragossa
Nobler-featured, haughtier-tempered,
Than the Alcalde's youthful grandson,
Donna Clara's boy Pedrillo.
.....

Emma Lazarus

A Ballad

In a costly palace Youth goes clad in gold;
In a wretched workhouse Age's limbs are cold:
There they sit, the old men by a shivering fire,
Still close and closer cowering, warmth is their desire.
.....

Charles Lamb

The Night Before Larry Was Stretched

The night before Larry was stretched,
The boys they all paid him a visit;
A bait in their sacks, too, they fetched;
They sweated their duds till they riz it:
.....

Anonymous

Thousand Star Hotel, Hanoi

I.

Over the road from the three star Galaxy Hotel is our hotel,
the old park on Phan Dinh Phung Street,
.....

S. K. Kelen

The Housekeeper

I let myself in at the kitchen door.
“It's you,” she said. “I can't get up. Forgive me
Not answering your knock. I can no more
Let people in than I can keep them out.
.....

Robert Frost

Two Gardens In Linndale

Two brothers, Oakes and Oliver,
Two gentle men as ever were,
Would roam no longer, but abide
In Linndale, where their fathers died,
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Two Old Crows

Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Thinking of effect and cause,
Of weeds and flowers,
.....

Vachel Lindsay

A Twig Alighted

A twig alighted on a fence and dozed;
So do I sleep.
The fruit fell and what have I to do with my trunk,
What with my branch?
.....

Hayyim Nahman Bialik

The Flood

On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood
I've seen the winter floods their gambols play
Through each old arch that trembled while I stood
Bent o'er its wall to watch the dashing spray
.....

John Clare

My Song

This song of mine will wind its music around you, my child, like
the fond arms of love.
This song of mine will touch your forehead like a kiss of
blessing.
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

Morning.

O now the crimson east, its fire-streak burning,
Tempts me to wander 'neath the blushing morn,
Winding the zig-zag lane, turning and turning,
As winds the crooked fence's wilder'd thorn.
.....

John Clare

Manners

For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
.....

Elizabeth Bishop

The Earth

Spring bursts violently
into Moscow houses.
Moths flutter about
crawl on summer hats,
.....

Boris Pasternak

Johan Ludvig Heiberg 1860

To the grave they bore him sleeping,
Him the aged, genial gardener;
Now the children gifts are heaping
From the flower-bed he made.
.....

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Panels

THE WEST window is a panel of marching onions.
Five new lilacs nod to the wind and fence boards.
The rain dry fence boards, the stained knot holes, heliograph a peace.
(How long ago the knee drifts here and a blizzard howling at the knot holes, whistling winter war drums?)
.....

Carl Sandburg

A Drought Idyll

It was the middle of the drought; the ground was hot and bare,
You might search for grass with a microscope, but nary grass was there;
The hay was done, the cornstalks gone, the trees were dying fast,
The sun o'erhead was a curse in read and the wind was a furnace blast;
.....

George Essex Evans