The best Author's Poems

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

When death comes, it will have your eyes-
This death that is always with us,
From morning till evening, sleepless,
Deaf, like an old remorse
Or some senseless bad habit. Your eyes
Will be a pointless word,
A stifled scream, a silence;
The way they appear to you each morning,
When you lean over, alone,
Into the mirror. Sweet hope,
That day we too shall know
That you are life and you are nothingness.
For each of us, death has a face.
When death comes, it will have your eyes.
It will be like quitting some bad habit,
Like seeing a dead face
Resurface out of the mirror,
Like listening to shut lips.
We'll go down into the vortex in silence.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

I'll wander the streets till I'm dead tired,
I'll learn to live alone and look each passing face
straight in the eye and still be what I am.
This coolness ascending in me, searching through my veins,
is an awakening each morning that I've never felt
so real -except that I feel stronger
than my body, and a colder shiver comes each morning now.
The mornings I had at twenty are now far: away.
And tomorrow, twenty-one: tomorrow I'll go out in tile streets.
I remember every stone, and the layers of the sky.
From tomorrow people will start seeing me,
I'll walk straight, and perhaps I'll pause
to see myself in windows. There were mornings once
when I was young and didn't know it, didn't even know
that who was passing by was me - a woman, mistress
of herself. The scrawny girl I used to be
was awakened by a weeping that went on for years.
Now it's as if that grieving never was.
And all I want are colours. Colours don't weep,
they're like an awakening: tomorrow colours
will return. Every woman will go out into the street,
each body a colour - even the children.
And this body of mine, dressed after so much paleness
in a frivolous red, will repossess its life.
I'll feel glances slide over me
and I'll know I'm me: a sidelong look
and I'll see I'm there, among people. Each new morning
I'll go out into the streets and look for colours.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

The most beautiful of oceans
it that which we never sailed.
The most beautiful of our sons
hasn't yet grown.
The most beautiful of our days
we still have to live.
And that
which I would like to you of most beautiful
I haven't yet told you.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

When the lighted lamp is brought into the room I shall go. And then, perhaps, you will listen to the night, and hear my song when I am silent.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

You are still the one with the stone and the sling,
Man of my time. You were in the cockpit,
With the malevolent wings, the meridians of death,
-I have seen you - in the chariot of fire, at the gallows,
At the wheels of torture. I have seen you: it was you,
With your exact science set on extermination,
Without love, without Christ. You have killed again,
As always, as your fathers killed,
as the animals killed that saw you for the first time.
And this blood smells as on the day
When one brother told the other brother:
"Let us go into the fields." And that echo, chill, tenacious,
Has reached down to you, within your day.
Forgot, O sons, the clouds of blood
Risen from the earth, forget your fathers:
Their tombs sink down in ashes,
Black birds, the wind, cover their heart.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

Smile

Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You'll see the sun come shining through for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use of crying?
You'll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile.

• Add to Bookmarks
• Read and discuss

There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
You want to screw up the
works?
You want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
Then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?