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Phenomenal Woman
By: Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies. I say, It's in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me. I walk into a room Just as cool as you please, And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees. Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees. I say, It's the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me. Men themselves have wondered What they see in me. They try so much But they can't touch My inner mystery. When I try to show them They say they still can't see. I say, It's in the arch of my back, The sun of my smile, The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me. Now you understand Just why my head's not bowed. I don't shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing It ought to make you proud. I say, It's in the click of my heels, The bend of my hair, the palm of my hand, The need of my care, 'Cause I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
By: Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense To a discerning Eye Much Sense the starkest Madness âTis the Majority In this, as All, prevail Assent and you are sane Demure youâre straightway dangerous And handled with a Chain
A Work of Artifice:
By: Marge Piercy
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadnât many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
weâd opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmotherâs face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter the browns of earth,
though earthâs most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.
Mirror
By: Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful The eye of a little god, four cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over. Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Alone by Edgar Allan Poe
From childhoodâs hour I have not been
As others wereâI have not seen
As others sawâI could not bring
My passions from a common springâ
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrowâI could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same toneâ
And all I lovâdâ I lovâd aloneâ
Then âin my childhoodâin the dawn
Of a most stormy lifeâwas drawn
From evâry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me stillâ
From the torrent, or the fountainâ
From the red cliff of the mountainâ
From the sun that âround me rollâd
In its autumn tint of goldâ
From the lightning in the sky
As it passâd me flying byâ
From the thunder, and the stormâ
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my viewâ
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what Iâve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my childrenâs lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
When You are Old
by W. B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
An arm waves to us from the black window. We wave gaily to the arm. âWhen I hear trains at night I dream of being president,â I say dreamily. âAnd me first lady,â she says loyally. So when the last boxcars, named after wonderful, faraway places, and the caboose chuckle by we look eagerly to the road ahead. And there, poised and growling, are fifty Hell's Angels.
The Waking
Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
kidnap poem by Nikki Giovani ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter you to jones beach or maybe coney island or maybe just to my house lyric you in lilacs dash you in the rain blend into the beach to complement my see play the lyre for you ode you with my love song anything to win you wrap you in the red Black green show you off to mama yeah if i were a poet i'd kid nap you Catch by Robert Francis Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together, Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand, Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes, High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop, Make him scoop it up, make him as almost as possible miss it, Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly, Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant, Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy, Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down, Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning, And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.
Poetry Set 4
A Dream Deferred
By: Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Still I Rise by Maya Angelou You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
âHopeâ is the thing with feathers Emily Dickinson
"Hope" is the thing with feathersâ
That perches in the soulâ
And sings the tune without the wordsâ
And never stopsâat allâ
And sweetestâin the Galeâis heardâ
And sore must be the stormâ
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warmâ
I've heard it in the chillest landâ
And on the strangest Seaâ
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumbâof Me.
Read This Poem from the Bottom Up Ruth Porritt
This simple cathedral of praise. How you made, from the bottom up, Is for you to remember Of Andromeda. What remains Until you meet the ancient light With your sight you can keep ascending Its final transformation into space. And uphold The horizonâs urge to sculpt the sky Puts into relief Your familyâs mountain land Upon the rising air. In the distance A windward falcon is open high and steady Far above the tallest tree Just beyond your height. You see a young pine lifting its green spire By raising your eyes Out onto the roof deck. You pass through sliding glass doors And up to where the stairway ends. To the top of the penultimate stanza Past the second story,
Childhood is the Kingdom Where
Nobody Dies
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour, And they gave one candy in a pink and green stripĂ©d bag, or a jack knife, And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all. And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails, And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion With fleas that one never knew were there, Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know, Trekking off into the living world. You fetch a shoe box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now: So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep. But you do not wake up a month from then, two months A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God! Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, âmothers and fathers don't die. And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?" Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!" Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun, Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother." To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak; Who do not drink their tea, though they always said Tea was such a comfort. Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries; they are not tempted. Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason; They are not taken in. Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake them and yell at them; They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide back into their chairs. Your tea is cold now. You drink it standing up, And leave the house. BY CARL SANDBURG 1878 â 1967 Carl Sandburg
ILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and
Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the
conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five Nines that dropped behind.
