Explore Poems: Syllabic

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Five Chinese Verses
By Wendy Xu
Music, wind, someone’s car horn
Imagining to return
Buddha’s big toe on the lake
Your intricate gaze of form

Eating the lake like a word
Unzipped carefully by day
You walked it hesitantly
You taste something step by step

•

Losing my way, wildly blue
Perhaps annotated past
The return gaze,...
Jefferson Davis the Adoptive Father of the Mulatto Jim Limber Dreams He Is Crowned King of the Confederacy
By Shane McCrae
When Richmond is finally one of the

world’s great capitals I will line the streets

with apple trees and whenever a gust

of wind sweeps the...
Caedmon's Hymn
By Caedmon
Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard
metudæs mehti and his modgithanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs
eci dryctin or astelidæ.
he ærist scop ældu barnum
hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend
tha middingard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmehtig
Harlem Sweeties
By Langston Hughes
Have you dug the spill
Of Sugar Hill?
Cast your gims
On this sepia thrill:
Brown sugar lassie,
Caramel treat,
Honey-gold baby
Sweet enough to eat.
Peach-skinned girlie,
Coffee and cream,
Chocolate darling
Out of a dream.
Walnut tinted
Or cocoa brown,
Pomegranate-lipped
Pride of the town.
Rich cream-colored
To plum-tinted black,
Feminine sweetness
In Harlem’s no lack.
Glow of...
Theologies for Korah
By Dante Micheaux
from locusts and wild honey

On a lesser diet than that of the wretched
rests a prophecy: some of us come to prepare.
I stood before my god, at a foreign altar,
and promised to guide you; me, with my heretic
theology. I practice...
- Religion
- Christianity
- God & the Divine
- The Spiritual
- Living
- The Mind
- Verse Forms
- Sonnet
- Meters
- Syllabic
- Gratitude
- + 4 more
Wampum
By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The breaking of clouds begins with seizure.
A man grabs another, reasons ransom.

A murder averted in the thing’s scheme.
A cape’s shell transformed, more than one supposed.

What stands behind this? Enemy or friend?
(Yes, they can be both. Don’t you think I know?)

List:...
The Amnesty
By Caroline Bird
I surrender my weapons:
Catapult Tears, Rain-Cloud Hat,
Lip Zip, Brittle Coat, Taut Teeth
in guarded rows. Pluck this plate
of armor from my ear, drop
it in the Amnesty Bin,
watch my sadness land among
the dark shapes of memory.

Unarmed, now see me saunter
past Ticking Baggage,...
From “Empty Words”
By Zaffar Kunial
Meaning “homeland” — mulk
(in Kashmir) — exactly how
my son demands milk.

•

Full-rhyme with Jhelum,
the river nearest his home —
my father’s “realm.”

•

You can’t put a leaf
between written and oral;
that first A, or alif.

•

Letters. West to east
Mum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goes
east to west. Received.

•

Invader, to some —
neither...
The Long Voyage
By Malcolm Cowley
Not that the pines were darker there,
nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,
nor swifts more swift in summer air;
    it was my own country,

having its thunderclap of spring,
its long midsummer ripening,
its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,
    almost like any country,

yet being mine; its...
Ant
By Matthew Francis
All afternoon a reddish trickleout of the roots of the beech
and across the lawn,

a sort of rust that shines and dances.Close up, it proves to be ant,
each droplet a horned

traveler finicking its way roundthe crooked geometry
of a grass forest.

A finger...
Tanka
By Paul Violi
Where the blossoms fall
like snow on the dock
bring fifty thousand in cash

or you’ll never see
your baby again
On a Political Prisoner
By William Butler Yeats
She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers' touch
And from her fingers ate its...
The Rose Tree
By William Butler Yeats
'O words are lightly spoken,'
Said Pearse to Connolly,
'Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose Tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.'

'It needs to be but watered,'
James Connolly replied,...
Sixteen Dead Men
By William Butler Yeats
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?

You say...
September 1913
By William Butler Yeats
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray...
To Ireland in the Coming Times
By William Butler Yeats
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before...
Justice
By Rudyard Kipling
Across a world where all men grieve
And grieving strive the more,
The great days range like tides and leave
Our dead on every shore.
Heavy the load we undergo,
And our own hands prepare,...
"For All We Have And Are"
By Rudyard Kipling
For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o'erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone!
Though all we knew...
I Looked Up from My Writing
By Thomas Hardy
I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon's full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,...
Prologue—And Then She Owns You
By Patricia Smith
This is not morning. There is a nastiness
slowing your shoes, something you shouldn’t step in.
It’s shattered beads, stomped flowers, vomit—
such stupid beauty,

beauty you can stick a manicured finger
into and through, beauty that doesn’t rely
on any sentence the sun chants, it’s...

p1Five Chinese Verses

p1Jefferson Davis the Adoptive Father of the Mulatto Jim Limber Dreams He Is Crowned King of the Confederacy

p1Theologies for Korah

p1Wampum

p1The Amnesty

p1From “Empty Words”

p1The Long Voyage

p1Ant

Five Chinese Verses

Jefferson Davis the Adoptive Father of the Mulatto Jim Limber Dreams He Is Crowned King of the Confederacy

Theologies for Korah

Wampum

The Amnesty

From “Empty Words”

The Long Voyage

Ant