SWIMMING POEMS

Night Shift

The night shift,
The right shield,
To be aware
and be away,
.....

Francis Ngwenya

Nonga

Few hours pictures on s/media,
Nonga gone too early, mortuary ices like that we bought Sunday after church
What to think then, soil one me after relatives to come,
Temperature is above normal in a coffin can't scream
.....

Marco Babu

Is The Night Shift The Right Shield?

Is the night shift,
The right shield,
To be aware
and be away,
.....

Francis Ngwenya

Fair Eve

Fair Eve, as fair and still
As fairest thought, climbs the high sheltering hill;
As still and fair
As the white cloud asleep in the deep air.
.....

John Freeman

Dejection: An Ode

Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon,
With the old moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Man Of His Word

THE man of his word met a maid on the beach,
I The fine art of swimming he offered to teach
If she 'd go with him in the water so blue.
She sighed and said: ' Mister, if I go with you,
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

Sea Surface Full Of Clouds

                        I

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
.....

Wallace Stevens

Prothalamion

Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre
Sweete-breathing Zephyrus did softly play
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titans beames, which then did glyster fayre;
.....

Edmund Spenser

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

The Self We Share

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.

The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.
.....

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Iris By Night

One misty evening, one another's guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.
There came a moment of confusing lights,
.....

Robert Frost

Canto 13

Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
.....

Ezra Pound

Lancelot 06

The dark of Modred's hour not yet availing,
Gawaine it was who gave the King no peace;
Gawaine it was who goaded him and drove him
To Joyous Gard, where now for long his army,
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Wooing Song

Love is the blossom where there blows
Every thing that lives or grows:
Love doth make the Heav'ns to move,
And the Sun doth burn in love:
.....

Giles Fletcher

In A Garden

Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
.....

Amy Lowell

Endymion: Book Iv

Muse of my native land! loftiest Muse!
O first-born on the mountains! by the hues
Of heaven on the spiritual air begot:
Long didst thou sit alone in northern grot,
.....

John Keats

The Suicide

Bereft of soul
My body shall be bare.
Bereft of body
My soul shall be bare.
.....

Kamala Das

Mermaid

Hey when I was a lad in fishing town an old man said to me
You can spend your life your jolly life just sailing on the sea
Now you can search the world for pretty girls till your eyes are weak and dim
But don't go swimming with the mermaid son if you don't know how to swim
.....

Shel Silverstein

The Surfer

He thrust his joy against the weight of the sea;
climbed through, slid under those long banks of
foam--
(hawthorn hedges in spring, thorns in the face stinging).
.....

Judith Wright

Poem (you, My Photographer, You, Most Aware)

You, my photographer, you, most aware,
Who climbed to the bridge when the iceberg struck,
Climbed with your camera when the ship's hull broke,
And lighted your flashes and, standing passionate there,
.....

Delmore Schwartz

Prothalamion

“little soul, little flirting,
little perverse one
where are you off to now?
little wan one, firm one
.....

Delmore Schwartz

Love

Love!-what is love? a mere machine, a spring
For freaks fantastic, a convenient thing,
A point to which each scribbling wight most steer,
Or vainly hope for food or favour here;
.....

Thomas Gent

The Dead

Their reward is
they become innocent again,

and when they reappear in memory
.....

Kate Northrop

Metric Figure

There is a bird in the poplars!
It is the sun!
The leaves are little yellow fish
swimming in the river.
.....

William Carlos Williams

Long Ago

The sun was swimming in the purple tide,
His golden locks far floating on the sea,
When thou and I stole beachward, side by side,
To say adieu and dream of joys to be.
.....

Arthur Weir

The King Of Ys

Wild across the Breton country,
Fabled centuries ago,
Riding from the black sea border,
Came the squadrons of the snow.
.....

Bliss Carman

To A Cloud

Beautiful cloud! with folds so soft and fair,
Swimming in the pure quiet air!
Thy fleeces bathed in sunlight, while below
Thy shadow o'er the vale moves slow;
.....

William Cullen Bryant

The Kite

It was a day
All blue and lifting white,
When I went into the fields with Frank
To fly his kite.
.....

John Freeman

All Souls' Night

Epilogue to “A Vision'

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
.....

William Butler Yeats

The Odyssey: Book 05

And now, as Dawn rose from her couch beside Tithonus-harbinger of
light alike to mortals and immortals-the gods met in council and with
them, Jove the lord of thunder, who is their king. Thereon Minerva
began to tell them of the many sufferings of Ulysses, for she pitied
.....

Homer

Hiawatha's Fishing

Forth upon the Gitche Gumee,
On the shining Big-Sea-Water,
With his fishing-line of cedar,
Of the twisted bark of cedar,
.....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Merlin V

The sun went down, and the dark after it
Starred Merlin's new abode with many a sconced
And many a moving candle, in whose light
The prisoned wizard, mirrored in amazement,
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Odyssey: Book 23

Euryclea now went upstairs laughing to tell her mistress that her
dear husband had come home. Her aged knees became young again and
her feet were nimble for joy as she went up to her mistress and bent
over her head to speak to her. “Wake up Penelope, my dear child,”
.....

Homer

The Pond

Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
.....

Louise Gluck

What Makes Summer?

Winter froze both brook and well;
Fast and fast the snowflakes fell;
Children gathered round the hearth
Made a summer of their mirth;
.....

George Macdonald

Spring In Town

The country ever has a lagging Spring,
Waiting for May to call its violets forth,
And June its roses-showers and sunshine bring,
Slowly, the deepening verdure o'er the earth;
.....

William Cullen Bryant

Frost At Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud, -and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
.....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Twelve Days Of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me
A partridge in a pear tree.

.....

Anonymous

Seascape

This celestial seascape, with white herons got up as angels,
flying high as they want and as far as they want sidewise
in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections;
the whole region, from the highest heron
.....

Elizabeth Bishop

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

To An Ungentle Critic

The great sun sinks behind the town
Through a red mist of Volnay wine….
But what's the use of setting down
That glorious blaze behind the town?
.....

Robert Graves

The Head Of Bran The Blest

I

When the Head of Bran
Was firm on British shoulders,
.....

George Meredith

Recalling War

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,
The track aches only when the rain reminds.
The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood
The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.
.....

Robert Graves

Zone

At last you're tired of this elderly world

Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

.....

Guillaume Apollinaire

Roan Stallion

The dog barked; then the woman stood in the doorway, and hearing
iron strike stone down the steep road
Covered her head with a black shawl and entered the light rain;
she stood at the turn of the road.
.....

Robinson Jeffers

Grierson's Raid

Mount to horse-mount to horse;
Forward, Battalion!
Gallop the gallant force;
Down with Rebellion!
.....

Hanford Lennox Gordon

Ode To Fanny

Physician Nature! Let my spirit blood!
O ease my heart of verse and let me rest;
Throw me upon thy Tripod, till the flood
Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast.
.....

John Keats

Don Juan: Canto The Ninth

Oh, Wellington! (or 'Villainton'--for Fame
Sounds the heroic syllables both ways;
France could not even conquer your great name,
But punn'd it down to this facetious phrase-
.....

George Gordon Byron

Ode To A Large Tuna In The Market

Among the market greens,
a bullet
from the ocean
depths,
.....

Pablo Neruda

The Black Swan

When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
.....

Randall Jarrell