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My life is vile
I hate it so
I'll wait awhile
And then I'll go.
Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive,
Good may befall
I yet may thrive.
It is because I can't make up my mind
If God is good, impotent or...
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I'm an alien — I'm an alien to the faith my mother taught me;
I'm an alien to the God that heard my mother when she cried;
I'm a stranger to the comfort that my "Now I lay me" brought me,
To the Everlasting...
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I had a mother who read to me
Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea,
Cutlasses clenched in their yellow teeth,
"Blackbirds" stowed in the hold beneath.
I had a Mother who read me lays
Of ancient and gallant and golden days;...
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Waves whisper, wash rippled footprints in sand,
leave salt circles on skin. Toes curl, try to hold
a receding sea, the memory of how you left me
behind, the way you leaned out the car door
to say goodbye, turned to wave as you drove ...
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As we gathered in the shelter,
'twas as if we truly felt her
loving presence all around us.
We were sure that she had found us.
Then from the corner of my eye
appeared a golden butterfly.
In but the moment of a sigh, ...
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(Italian sonnet)
A rose and golden twilight paints the skies
as ocean breezes drift into their room
through open windows, shattering the gloom
that lingers where they whispered long goodbyes.
She gazes out to sea with teary eyes
and...
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The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo!
No more on life's parade shall meet
The brave and fallen few.
On Fame's eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards with...
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'Twas a stylish congregation, that of Theophrastus Brown, And its organ was the finest and the biggest in the town; And the chorus-all the papers favorably commented on it, For 'twas said each female member had a forty-dollar bonnet. Now in the...
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There was a Lass of Islington,
As I have heard many tell;
And she would to Fair London go,
Fine Apples and Pears to sell;
And as along the Streets she flung,
With her basket on her Arms;
Her Pears to sell, you may know it right...
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Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever...
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Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,...
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The sun was slumbering in the West,
My daily labors past;
On Anna's soft and gentle breast
My head reclined at last;
The darkness closed around, so dear
To fond cngenial souls,
And thus she murmur'd at my ear,
"My...
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Through grief and through danger thy smile hath cheer'd my way,
Till hope seem'd to bud from each thorn that round me lay;
The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn'd,
Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal...
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The time I've lost in wooing,
In watching and pursuing
The light, that lies
In woman's eyes,
Has been my heart's undoing.
Though Wisdom oft has sought me,
I scorn'd the lore she brought me,
My only books
Were...
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Oh, what would have been young Beauty’s doom,
Without a Bard to treasure her bloom,
They tell us that in the moon’s bright round
Things lost in this dark world are found;
So charms, on earth long past and gone,
In the...
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The young May moon is beaming, love,
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love;
How sweet to rove
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love! 5
Then awake!— the heavens look bright, my dear, ...
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April the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. ...
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They don't
make suitcases
like that
any more.
Time was,
when voyage meant
train, steamship
distances unbridgeable
waiting for a thinning mail
weeks, then months,
then nothing
Time was,
when this case
was...
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Thorns in late autumn
casting sharp gothic shadows
on a dust-brown path
© tom berman
Go back to author's page ~
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Sometimes
stretching forever
to the never-caught curve
at the rim of the universe
Then, telescoping to
femto-second flickers,
eons, mere blinks
of an owl's eye
Changing
chameleon-like
with the color
of our days
time...
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Herewith
a phrase or two
exploding you
o bladder of pomposity,
filled with fatuity
swollen, smirking sack
balloon of bloated bombast,
caricature of self-esteem
May my words be
as sharp shears
clipping off the wool...
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I'm thankful for the ordinary things,
like contented cats and husband,
a home, and garden to enjoy.
I'm glad my children avoided drugs,
have grown and flourished as themselves,
and made something of themselves.
I...
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I want to find that other world,
the one where Mozart lived past thirty-six,
and Beethoven didn't lose his hearing,
where Schubert finished the Unfinished
and sang more than six hundred songs,
where Chopin rippled and rang for ninety...
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(The Northridge, California, Earthquake, 1-17-1994)
The Astronomer was up the mountain,
loving his large telescope on a clear,
star-spangled night. The ginger cat
was roaming outside, and I
was reading, lacking sleep because
my...
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Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room
Barrel house kings with feet unstable
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table
Pounded on the table
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom
Hard as they were able
Boom Boom Boom
With a...
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