Bus Poems

Quote
 Poem
 Author
To You STRANGER! If you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me,
why should you not speak to me
And why should I not speak to you
 Walt Whitman
 Find a pleasure; meet and know it. /That sensation is the seed/ for your orchard of beauty,/ bliss and becoming.
  Hey, Fat Kid!
  Kimberly Dark
The perfect poem is something/ crass and kissing, full of assumptions,/ is green and gamey, a field of chamomile/ or nettles, filigreed, and lit from within.

 Sheila Squillante
 I'm not flat and sly Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
  What Kind of Person
  Yehuda Amichai
In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.
  Why is This Age Worse…
  Anna Akmatova
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
  A Poison Tree
  William Blake
Will you walk a little faster said a whiting to a snail,
There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle, will you come and join the dance
  The Lobster Quadrille
  Lewis Carroll
The south-winds are quick-witted,
The schools are sad and slow,
The masters quite omitted
The lore we care to know.
  April
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none's to spill nor spend.
  The Sea and the Skylark
  Gerard Manley Hopkins
Awake! arise! the hour is late!
   Angels are knocking at thy door!
They are in haste and cannot wait,
   And once departed come no more.
  A Fragment
  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I'll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases,
Take a bank note and fold it up,
And then you will find your money in creases!
  Epigram for Wall Street
  Edgar Allen Poe
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
  Sonnet VIII



  Fernando Pessoa
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove
  Sonnet CXVI
  William Shakespeare
Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope
In the worst moment of these evil days;
 Here Pause: The poet claims at least this praise
  William Wordsworth
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
  The Second Coming
  William Butler Yeats
 When I ask you to remember,
you show me finches in a field.
You are filled with birds that startle,
won’t  allow me near.
 Memory Loss
  Sally Bliumis-Dunn
The world has no memory;/ the forsythia, persistent, perennial,/ naïve, bursts again into spring time,/ asks us again to believe.
 The Cutters
  Van Hartmann
I still don’t know my place. I cross against the red light,
teach Whitman and Doty, and love the awkward ones
who end up in my office, in black lipstick
and studded leather, insisting on beauty.
 Fragment
  Laurel Peterson
 If my lover were a comet
          Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
          In his hair.
  This Much and More
  Djuna Barnes
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
 America
  Claude McKay
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
  The Heart of a Woman
 Georgia Douglass Johnson
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight":
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
  The Rubáiyát of Omar   Khayyám
  Omar Khayyam
It's not just me having difficulty breathing
as I hike up this mountain in high altitude.
A river I passed a mile back stopped
running, slowed down and started to walk.
  Hiking
  Kevin Pilkington
Sky dark as coffee.
You dress by TV’s blue glow.
Time to go, head for the bus stop
wait as day breaks pink and full of promise.
 Another Rising
  Linda Simone
The lights in my eyes wink at hers in the street
Luminous her desire, my surrender unconditional
We journey sitting still, rooted in place we fly
Do I know anyone who’s been burned by too much love?
  Fragments: 6
  Ralph Nazareth
I am from long sidewalks and the rush
of commuter trains, parks that roamed
the rind of the Long Island Sound, and
the flash of bicycle spokes in the sun.
  Backstory
  Susan Moorhead
Black  mellow  dark  beautiful  majesty
Black  mellow  dark  beautiful  majesty
I stared it in the eye
a wide and indivisible geography
Since then I am a doubt planting questions
 The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo
  Marianela Medrano
 La majestad tersa oscura—negra—bella
Le mire a los ojos—geografía extensa e indivisible—
Desde entonces soy una duda clavando interrogantes
 El Ombligo Negro de un Bongó
  Marianela Medrano
I'm nobody! Who are you
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish - you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
 Emily Dickinson
 'Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
  A Prayer in Spring
  Robert Frost
 Fear is a dark horizon
a stone wall against dreams
a levee against change
a chasm too wide. 
 Fear
  Fay Stevenson-Smith