Poems List
Explore poems from our collection
Personality
Personality
Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau
You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have…
Plowboy
Plowboy
After the last red sunset glimmer,
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
A plowboy and two horses l…
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
I have been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
On a Saturday morning <…
Passers-By
Passers-By
Passers-by,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe sol…
Our Prayer of Thanks
Our Prayer of Thanks
For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.
For the laugh…
On the Way
On the Way
Little one, you have been buzzing in the books,
Flittering in the newspapers and drinking beer with lawyers
And amid the educated men of the c…
Omaha
Omaha
Red barns and red heiffers spot the green
grass circles around Omaha--the farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon-loads of
cheese.
…
Old Timers
Old Timers
I am an ancient reluctant conscript.
On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
On the march of Miltiades' phalanx I ha…
Neighbors
Neighbors
On Forty-first Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.
If houses went on crutches
this house would be
Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard
Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard
Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round …
Muckers
Muckers
Twenty men stand watching the muckers.
Stabbing the sides of the ditch
Where clay gleams yellow,
Driving the blades of their shovels …
Monosyllabic
Monosyllabic
Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool, on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic . . .…
Mill-Doors
Mill-Doors
You never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then…
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe he believes me, maybe not.
Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.
Maybe the wind on the prairie,
The wind on the sea, mayb…
Manual System
Manual System
Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears
And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.
Flashes and flashes--voies and voices <…
Mask
Mask
Fling your red scarf faster and faster, dancer.
It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves, masses of green.
Your red scarf flashes…
Mamie
Mamie
Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance
and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all r…
Lost
Lost
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly, <…
Localities
Localities
Wagon wheel gap is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.
Red-shirted miners picking in th…
Limited
Limited
I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go f…
Last Answers
Last Answers
I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl …
Lawyer
Lawyer
When the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct and cross examinations,
hot clashes
of lawyers and cool decisions of the j…
Kin
Kin
Brother, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother—
Not for years, anyhow;
Maybe thousands of years,…
Jungheimer's
Jungheimer's
In western fields of corn and northern timber lands,
They talk about me, a saloon with a soul,
The soft red lights, the long curving b…