VICIOUS POEMS

Poem Dedicated To Every Girl Rapped In Kashmir

In a vicious country, and a distant age
A girl was born of biddable and
penniless parentage,
The moon that glittered upon her
.....

Adnan Shafi

We Are But Different

As the time ticks,
A tale, fantasy or real unfolds.
As we share these sips,
Like our cups, these words pour.
.....

Az Mo

Wounded

Is it not strange? A year ago to-day,
With scarce a thought beyond the hum-drum round,
I did my decent job and earned my pay;
Was averagely happy, I'll be bound.
.....

Robert Service

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

Absalom And Achitophel

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:
.....

John Dryden

The Prostitute

Woman of weeping eye, ah! for thy wretched lot,
Putting on smiles to lure the lewd passenger,
Smiling while anguish gnaws at thy heavy heart;

.....

Henry Kirk White

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

The Bestiary: Or Orpheus-s Procession

(Le Bestiaire ou Cortège dâ??Orphée)

Orpheus

.....

Guillaume Apollinaire

Becoming A Dad

Old women say that men don't know
The pain through which all mothers go,
And maybe that is true, and yet
I vow I never shall forget
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

The Old King's New Jester

You that in vain would front the coming order
With eyes that meet forlornly what they must,
And only with a furtive recognition
See dust where there is dust,â??
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

A Retort

As vicious women think all men are knaves,
And shrew-bound gentlemen discourse of slaves;
As reeling drunkards judge the world unsteady
And idlers swear employers ne'er get ready
.....

Ambrose Bierce

Portent

Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
.....

Robert William Service

Ned The Larrikin

A SONG that is bitter with griefâ??a ballad as pale as the light
That comes with the fall of the leaf, I sing to the shadows to-night.

The laugh on the lyrical lips is sadder than laughter of ghosts
.....

Henry Kendall

Damætas

In law an infant, and in years a boy,
In mind a slave to every vicious joy;
From every sense of shame and virtue wean'd;
In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;
.....

George Gordon Byron

The Lady's Dressing Room

By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
Strephon, who found the room was void
.....

Jonathan Swift

Lost

"He ought to be home," said the old man, "without there's something amiss.
He only went to the Two-mile -- he ought to be back by this.
He would ride the Reckless filly, he would have his wilful way;
And, here, he's not back at sundown -- and what will his mother say?
.....

Banjo Paterson

The Choir Invisible

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
.....

George Eliot

George Mullen's Confession

For the sake of guilty conscience, and the heart that ticks the
time
Of the clockworks of my nature, I desire to say that I'm
A weak and sinful creature, as regards my daily walk
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

The Lady Of La Garaye - Part I

ON Dinan's walls the morning sunlight plays,
Gilds the stern fortress with a crown of rays,
Shines on the children's heads that troop to school,
Turns into beryl-brown the forest pool,
.....

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

To John Ruskin

(After reading his 'Modern Painters')
YES, you do well to mock us, you
Who knew our bitter woe â??
To jeer the false, deny the true
.....

Francis William Lauderdale Adams

Waltz

I touch hatred like a covered breast;
I without stopping go from garment to garment,
sleeping at a distance.

.....

Pablo Neruda

The Traveller-heart

(To a Man who maintained that the Mausoleum is the
Stateliest Possible Manner of Interment)


.....

Vachel Lindsay

Largo E Mesto

Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent Influence released
From the most squalid cellarage of hell,
.....

William Ernest Henley

The Lady's Dressing Room

Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades, and tissues.
.....

Jonathan Swift

The Old King's New Jester

You that in vain would front the coming order
With eyes that meet forlornly what they must,
And only with a furtive recognition
See dust where there is dust,-
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Merlin Iv

The tortured King-seeing Merlin wholly meshed
In his defection, even to indifference,
And all the while attended and exalted
By some unfathomable obscurity
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

To Interrupt His Yellow Plan

591

To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
.....

Emily Dickinson

For A Dead Lady

No more with overflowing light
Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another's fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Portent

Courage mes gars:
La guerre est proche.

I plant my little plot of beans,
.....

Robert Service

The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode On The Birth Of Lincoln

I

O, fairest Dame of sylvan glades,
We come to pay thee homage due,
.....

Edward Smyth Jones

Lancelot 05

Gawaine, his body trembling and his heart
Pounding as if he were a boy in battle,
Sat crouched as far away from everything
As walls would give him distance. Bedivere
.....

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Sword Blades And Poppy Seed

A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
.....

Amy Lowell

Passion And The Skull

An Old Colophon

Passion sits on the skull
Of Humanity,
.....

Charles Baudelaire

Friendship

What virtue, or what mental grace
But men unqualified and base
Will boast it their possession?
Profusion apes the noble part
.....

William Cowper

The Old, Old Story And The New Order

They proved we could not think nor see,
They proved we could not write,
They proved we drank the day away
And raved through half the night.
.....

Henry Lawson

The Swanks Of Gosh

Come mourn with me for the land of Gosh,
Oh, weep with me for the luckless Glugs
Of the land of Gosh, where the sad seas wash
The patient shores, and the great King Splosh
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

The Statue Of Liberty

This statue of Liberty, busy man,
Here erect in the city square,
I have watched while your scrubbings, this early morning,
Strangely wistful,
.....

Thomas Hardy

How A Girl Was Too Reckless Of Grammar By Far

Matilda Maud Mackenzie frankly hadn't any chin,
Her hands were rough, her feet she turned invariably in;
Her general form was German,
By which I mean that you
.....

Guy Wetmore Carryl

To Interrupt His Yellow Plan

591

To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
.....

Emily Dickinson

Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 3

For a Man is to be looked upon in that which he excells as on a prospect.

For there be twelve cardinal virtues -- three to the East -- Greatness, Valour, Piety.

.....

Christopher Smart

The Responsibility Of Fatherhood

BEFORE you came, my little lad,
I used to think that I was good,
Some vicious habits, too, I had,
But wouldn't change them if I could.
.....

Edgar Albert Guest

On The Trek

Oh, the weary, weary journey on the trek, day after day,
With sun above and silent veldt below;
And our hearts keep turning homeward to the youngsters far away,
And the homestead where the climbing roses grow.
.....

Banjo Paterson

London Voluntaries Iv: Out Of The Poisonous East

Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent Influence released
From the most squalid cellerage of hell,
.....

William Ernest Henley

To Mr. Delany,[1]

OCT. 10, 1718 NINE IN THE MORNING

To you whose virtues, I must own
With shame, I have too lately known;
.....

Jonathan Swift

Cypher Seven [07]

The nearer camp fires lighted,
The distant beacons brightâ??
The horsemen on the skyline
Are closing in to-night!
.....

Henry Lawson

The Labyrinth

Life is a crooked Labyrinth, and we
Are daily lost in that Obliquity.
'Tis a perplexed circle, in whose round
Nothing but sorrows and new sins abound.
.....

Henry King

Crazed

'The Spring again hath started on the course
Wherein she seeketh Summer thro' the Earth.
I will arise and go upon my way.
It may be that the leaves of Autumn hid
.....

Sydney Thompson Dobell

The Day That Is Dead

Ah, Jack! Time finds us feeble men,
And all too swift our years have flown.
The days are different now to then -
In that time when we rode ten stone.
.....

Harry 'breaker' Harbord Morant

The Moralizer Corrected. A Tale

A hermit (or if â??chance you hold
That title now too trite and old),
A man, once young, who lived retired
As hermit could have well desired,
.....

William Cowper

Brer Rabbit, You's De Cutes' Of 'em All

Once der was a meetin' in de wilderness,
All de critters of creation dey was dar;
Brer Rabbit, Brer ‘Possum, Brer Wolf, Brer Fox,
King Lion, Mister Terrapin, Mister B'ar.
.....

James Weldon Johnson