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Best

Mother, I see you with your nursery light,
Leading your babies, all in white,
To their sweet rest;
Christ, the Good Shepherd, carries mine tonight,
And that is best.

I cannot help tears when I see them twine
Their fingers in yours, and their bright curls shine
On your warm breast.
But the Saviour's is purer than yours or mine.
He can love best.

You tremble each hour because your arms
Are weak; your heart is wrung with alarms
And sore opprest:
My darlings are safe, out of reach of harm
And that is best.

You know over yours may hang even now
Pain and disease, whose fulfilling slow,

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poem by Helen Hunt Jackson
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The Wintergarden l

I know you don't care. Do you care?
when I call it uncanny, the way
they continue to continue, far into Fall
under a dim, day moon
under a denim sky of washed-out blue
cirrhus-streaked, here and there,
which means it will be cold soon
each little ball
opening like a fist,
crickets ulullating in the mist.

Opening sans-cesse
one upon another after another
whispering how the show must on:
fringey purple cosmos; endlessly ambitious
sea-blue convulvulus, all more or less
wrung from tendrils, less or more
conforming to the trees they wind upon,
dew-strung with little crystal pears
but never so delicious;

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poem by Morgan Michaels
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To A Small Boy Standing On My Shoes While I Am Wearing Them

Let's straighten this out, my little man,
And reach an agreement if we can.
I entered your door as an honored guest.
My shoes are shined and my trousers are pressed,
And I won't stretch out and read you the funnies
And I won't pretend that we're Easter bunnies.
If you must get somebody down on the floor,
What in the hell are your parents for?
I do not like the things that you say
And I hate the games that you want to play.
No matter how frightfully hard you try,
We've little in common, you and I.
The interest I take in my neighbor's nursery
Would have to grow, to be even cursory,
And I would that performing sons and nephews
Were carted away with the daily refuse,
And I hold that frolicsome daughters and nieces
Are ample excuse for breaking leases.
You may take a sock at your daddy's tummy
Or climb all over your doting mummy,

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poem by Ogden Nash
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Slave Produce

Eat! they are cates for a lady's lip,
Rich as the sweets that the wild bees sip;
Mingled viands that nature hath pour'd,
From the plenteous stores of her flowing board,
Bearing no trace of man's cruelty—save
The red life-drops of his human slave.

List thee, lady! and turn aside,
With a loathing heart, from the feast of pride;
For, mix'd with the pleasant sweets it bears,
Is the hidden curse of scalding tears,
Wrung out from woman's bloodshot eye,
By the depth of her deadly agony.

Look! they are robes from a foreign loom,
Delicate, light, as the rose leaf's bloom;
Stainless and pure in their snowy tint,
As the drift unmarked by a footstep's print.
Surely such garment should fitting be,
For woman's softness and purity.

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poem by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler from Poetical Works (1836)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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From Top To Bottom

O Buddha, had you but foreknown
The vices of your priesthood
It would have made you twist and moan
As any wounded beast would.
You would have damned the entire lot
And turned a Christian, would you not?

There were no Christians, I'll allow,
In your day; that would only
Have brought distinction. Even now
A Christian might feel lonely.
All take the name, but facts are things
As stubborn as the will of kings.

The priests were ignorant and low
When ridiculed by Lucian;
The records, could we read, might show
The same of times Confucian.
And yet the fact I can't disguise
That Deacon Rankin's good and wise.

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poem by Ambrose Bierce
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To His Wife

O Pure of soul, and fond and deep of heart
For those who darkened be,
Lift up thy holy voice, at morn and eve,
And pray for me,—

For me, who for this thronging world’s hot strife
A prize hath brought to be
Among the known—but sweet too dearly earned;
Ah, pray for me.

Not aye the scholar’s path a track of peace,
Nor from the dread sins free;
Hard by the Isles of Truth doth Circe prowl;
Oh, pray for me.

The spirits’ hell-gloom and its hurricane
Round studious cells may be;
Thou patient Moon of Memory’s dreary sky,
Oh, pray for me.

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poem by Daniel Henry Deniehy
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Life ‘ in extremis’

When sorrow profound strikes an author’s heart
And joy eludes his life throughout for long;
No more roads is left for his crippled art,
Leaving him poor, diseased, in utter debt!
Though history’s full of real examples,
Of authors talented, yet struggling hard;
Unable to make both ends meet,
Quaffing cheap spirits with anguished minds;
Reaching ledges for a final fall!
“Oh, cruel Nature! Oh, deaf /mute God!
Why hast Thou forsaken me?
Could not my cup of woes, less bitter be? ”
Crestfallen, frustrated, in despair ’yond compare,
The author raises a glass of hemlock to his lips,
To drain the poison down his throat,
To breathe his last, yet wears a smile so brave!
“I’ve wrung my heart off all its blood so dry;
I’ve sweated blood when others slept in sex;
What could I do if luck didn’t smile my way?
Let people say whatever they must say!

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poem by John Celes
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Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore

Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore —
No doubt you have heard the name before —
Was a boy who never would shut a door!

The wind might whistle, the wind might roar,
And teeth be aching and throats be sore,
But still he never would shut the door.

His father would beg, his mother implore,
'Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore,
We really do wish you would shut the door!'

Their hands they wrung, their hair they tore;
But Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore
Was deaf as the buoy out at the Nore.

When he walked forth the folks would roar,
'Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore,
Why don't you think to shut the door?'

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poem by William Brighty Rands
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She Had No Boundaries

She was not a bounded entity;
rather she flowed through human-ness
of
but not a part of things;
a ethereal presence-
high-voiced
light laughter-
all around
blond hair
which highlight glowed
both day and night.

She was married to recklessness
satiation, excess
drunken orgiastic
extremes
dark and light emotions mixed;
she was easy
and hard;
full-faced

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poem by Lonnie Hicks
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Pieter Marinus

LORD, I have known all fruits of this thy world;
Like Solomon king, I have been fain of all,–
War, women, and wine,–but mine was spirit of Nantes.
And now, O Lord, I'm old and fain for Thee.
But, Lord, my soul's so grimed and weather-worn,
So warped and wrung with all iniquities,
Piracies, brawls, and cheated revenues,
There's not a saint but would look twice at it.

So, when my time comes, send no angels down
With lutes, and harps, and foreign instruments,
To pipe old Pieter's spirit up to heaven
Past his tall namesake sturdy at his post.

But let me lie awhile in these Thy seas.
Let the soft Gulf Stream and the long South Drift,
And the swift tides that rim the Labrador,
Beat on my soul and wash it clean again.

And when Thy waves have smoothed me of my sins,

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poem by Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall
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