IRON POEMS

One Africa

We were once victims altogether
Once slaves in our homeland
The struggle, we fought together
Fought against the unjust systems
.....

Bright Madziva

Michael: A Pastoral Poem

If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
.....

William Wordsworth

Vallabhbhai Patel

I remember the story of that great person
who fought for our freedom and was great,
who was against the partition
but not against the Muslim .
.....

Ankit Patel

Apology

My dear beloved parents,
You cared & raised me,
Sent school to learn,
Made me what I am today,
.....

Norbu Dorji

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

What We Needed.

What does our country need? Not armies standing
With sabres gleaming ready for the fight.
Not increased navies, skillful and commanding,
To bound the waters with an iron might.
.....

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Auguries Of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
.....

William Blake

Japan

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

.....

Billy Collins

Nothing On Earth Can Destroy

Giant Titanic was built with safety measure,
With painstaking effort,
Lending thousands of hands,
Investing millions,
.....

Norbu Dorji

Venus And Adonis

Even as the sun with purple-coloured face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
.....

William Shakespeare

The Trail Of Ninety-eight

Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure-Gold!
.....

Robert Service

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
.....

Nazim Hikmet

The Neighbor

Man stomping over my bed in boots
carrying a large bronze church bell
which you occasionally drop:
gross man with iron heels
.....

Marge Piercy

Cultural Exchange

In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doors are doors of paper
Dust of dingy atoms
Blows a scratchy sound.
.....

Langston Hughes

The Roll Of The Kettledrum; Or, The Lay Of The Last Charger

“You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?”-Byron.
.....

Adam Lindsay Gordon

The Prairie

The skies are blue above my head,
The prairie green below,
And flickering o'er the tufted grass
The shifting shadows go,
.....

John Hay

South Of My Days

South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
.....

Judith Wright

The English Flag

Above the portico a flag-staff, bearing the Union Jack,
remained fluttering in the flames for some time, but ultimately
when it fell the crowds rent the air with shouts,
and seemed to see significance in the incident. -- DAILY PAPERS.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,
.....

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Odyssey: Book 09

And Ulysses answered, “King Alcinous, it is a good thing to hear a
bard with such a divine voice as this man has. There is nothing better
or more delightful than when a whole people make merry together,
with the guests sitting orderly to listen, while the table is loaded
.....

Homer

Letter To Maria Gisborne

The spider spreads her webs, whether she be
In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree;
The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves
His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves;
.....

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Last Man

By heaven and hell, and all the fools between them,
I will not die, nor sleep, nor wink my eyes,
But think myself into a god; old Death
Shall dream he has slain me, and I'll creep behind him,
.....

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
.....

Robert Frost

Lepanto

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
.....

G. K. Chesterton

Young Democracy

HARK! Young Democracy from sleep
Our careless sentries raps:
A backwash from the Futureâ??s deep
Our Evilâ??s foreland laps.
.....

Bernard O'dowd

Tapestry Trees

Oak.

I am the Roof-tree and the Keel;
I bridge the seas for woe and weal.
.....

William Morris

The Dance Of Death

THE warder looks down at the mid hour of night,
On the tombs that lie scatter'd below:
The moon fills the place with her silvery light,
And the churchyard like day seems to glow.
.....

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The Fourth Of August

Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.
.....

Robert Laurence Binyon

The Shark

He seemed to know the harbour,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
.....

E. J. Pratt

Satire Iv

Well; I may now receive, and die. My sin
Indeed is great, but yet I have been in
A purgatory, such as fear'd hell is
A recreation and scant map of this.
.....

John Donne

Fragment Sixty-eight

. . . even in the house of Hades.

-Sappho

.....

H. D.

A Modest Request

Complied With After The Dinner At President Everett's Inauguration

Scene, - a back parlor in a certain square,
Or court, or lane, - in short, no matter where;
.....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

To Death

Come not in terrors clad, to claim
An unresisting prey:
Come like an evening shadow, Death!
So stealthily, so silently!
.....

Caroline Southey

The Passionate Pilgrim

I.
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
.....

William Shakespeare

To Winter

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
.....

William Blake

The Witch Of Wenham

I.
Along Crane River's sunny slopes
Blew warm the winds of May,
And over Naumkeag's ancient oaks
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

To T.l.h.

A CHILD


Model of thy parent dear,
.....

Charles Lamb

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

The Rock-tomb Of Bradore

A DREAR and desolate shore!
Where no tree unfolds its leaves,
And never the spring wind weaves
Green grass for the hunter's tread;
.....

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Iliad: Book 23

Thus did they make their moan throughout the city, while the
Achaeans when they reached the Hellespont went back every man to his
own ship. But Achilles would not let the Myrmidons go, and spoke to
his brave comrades saying, “Myrmidons, famed horsemen and my own
.....

Homer

The Cry Of The Children

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
.....

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Endymion: Book Iii

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
.....

John Keats

An Octopus

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
.....

Marianne Moore

Power

The mighty sound of forests murmuring
In answer to the dread command;
The stars that shudder when their king
extends his hand,
.....

Aleister Crowley

Madam And Her Madam

I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.
.....

Langston Hughes

Tamerlane - Early Version

I.

I have sent for thee, holy friar;1
But 'twas not with the drunken hope,
.....

Edgar Allan Poe

Pictures From Theocritus

FROM IDYL I.

Goat-herd, how sweet above the lucid spring
The high pines wave with breezy murmuring!
.....

William Lisle Bowles

The Rebel

Call me traitor to my country and a rebel to my God.
And the foe of â??law and orderâ?, well deserving of the rod,
But I scorn the biassed sentence from the temples of the creed
That was fouled and mutilated by the ministers of greed,
.....

Henry Lawson

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
.....

Elizabeth Bishop

Odysseus: In Memory Of Arthur Griffith

You had the prose of logic and of scorn,
And words to sledge an iron argument,
And yet you could draw down the outland birds
To perch beside the ravens of your thought
.....

Padraic Colum