MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
  Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
  She walks the sodden pas […]

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled f […]

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours m […]

Juvenalia/Juvenilia
by a much younger Michael Hoke

My thoughts unfold, the air grows cold
As if it knows I’ll need the snows
To quench my mental fire:
My future turns—ignites and b […]

I AM dying, Egypt, dying!
  Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,
And the dark Plutonian shadows
  Gather on the evening blast;
Let thine arm, O Queen, enfol […]

Pale amber sunlight falls across
   The reddening October trees,
   That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
   Seems little, dear! on days […]

by A.E. Houseman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing […]

The Cromlech
by Louis MacNeice

From trivia of froth and pollen
White tufts in the rabbit […]

Life Cycle of Common Man
by Howard Nemerov

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This […]

Oh. I thought it had something to do with the administration or administrator of the site. […]

Even though I managed to swerve around the lump
of groundhog lying on its back on the road,
he traveled with me for miles,

a quiet passenger
who passed the time looking out the […]

Your post makes me realize that what this particular dead trope, nestled in the hay of our minds, has bequeathed to the world is a character. The early bird. Old fellow. […]

Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given […]

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
The […]

The complacency of this student, late
for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,
who sits in her sunny chair,
with a container of coffee and an orange,
a cockatoo swinging […]

It’s autumn in the country I remember.

How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.

It’s cold […]

The rain of London pimples
The ebony street with white
And the neon lamps of London
Stain the canals of night
And the park becomes a jungle
In the alchemy of night.

My wishes turn […]

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at […]