POETRY

Updated December 2021

Percy Shelley

Ozymandias (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Rudyard Kipling

If— (1895)

If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
   And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
   Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
   If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
   With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
   And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken (1915)

The Atlantic - August 1915

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

W.B. Yeats

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Langston Hughes

Minstrel Man (1925)

Link

Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long.

Because my mouth Is wide with laughter, You do not hear My inner cry, Because my feet Are gay with dancing, You do not know I die.

William Carlos Williams

This is Just To Say (1938)

Link

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

Adrienne Rich

November 1968 (1968)

Link

Stripped you’re beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won’t hold you nor the radar aerials

You’re what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to pieces you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you until this moment I know nothing about it my ignorance of you amazes me now that I watch you starting to give yourself away to the wind

Pablo Neruda

Ode to My Socks (1972)

https://poets.org/poem/ode-my-socks (this is a translation from the original Spanish by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself with her sheepherder’s hands, two socks as soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if they were two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin, Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons, my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks. They were so handsome for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that woven fire, of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation to save them somewhere as schoolboys keep fireflies, as learned men collect sacred texts, I resisted the mad impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and pieces of pink melon. Like explorers in the jungle who hand over the very rare green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter.

Li-Young Lee

Persimmons (1986)

Link

Lucille Clifton

Poem in Praise of Menstruation (1991)

Link

Philip Levine

What Work Is (1992)

Link

Naomi Shihab Nye

Blood (1995)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48602/blood-56d229f9da8a9

Martin Espada

Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996)

Link

Jeffrey McDaniel

The Quiet World (1998)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49238/the-quiet-world

Willie Perdomo

Unemployed Mami (2002)

Link

Even though she don’t have a job Mami still works hard. The last twenty three years of her life haven been spent teaching a poet and killing generations of cocaroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers, t.v. guides, and pink tissues. She prays fo rht epoet as he runs into the street looking for images of Boricua sweetness to explode in his face. The young roaches escape in the dark while my unemployed mami goes to sleep cursing at them.

Even though she don’t have a job Mami still works hard. She walked behind my drunken father, in the rain, as he stumbled into manhood and oblvion in America wearing his phony mambo king pinky ring. He bea my Mami, he beat my Mami, stop beating my Mami! with the black umbrella, the one with the fake ivory horsehead handle. I still hear the same salsa blaring ou the same social club where I use to fall asleep and dream happy lives

Even though she don’t have a job Mami still works hard. Every year she prays for my abuela who died in a sweet bed of Holy Water y Ben Gay while the poet was kicking his mother inside her stomach. Mamy looks at Miss America, Miss universe, Miss Everything, every year and then she runs into her bedroom to dig out her high school yearbook from underneath her pile of “importants papers”. “Look, Papo. Look at your mother when she was eighteen years old. She was prettier than those girls on t.v.” You still are, I say.

Even though she don’t have a job Mami still works hard. Lately she plays slow songs of lost love over and over and over. She looks out the window only when it rains, measuring tear drops against the rain drops. Where i sthat man, I wonder, as I sit in my room writing and re-writing and re-writing this poem for her. I catch her peeking at me from the corner of her eye, wondering if I do, I really do, love you and that’s not the record, that’s me, I say, hugging her with a kiss.

Don’t cry, Mami.

Even though you don’t have a job I know you still be working hard.

Agha Shahid Ali

Lenox Hill (2002)

Link (this is a sestina)

Jessica Goodheart

Advice for a Stegosaurus (2005)

Link

Sherman Alexie

On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City (2006)

Link

The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond? '

and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen, ' I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born

and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born. I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.’ But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice

back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out

another little piece of her country’s history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time

somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.