Have You An Eye - Edwin Ford Piper

Have you an eye for the trails, the trails,
    The old mark and the new?
What scurried here, what loitered there,
    In the dust and in the dew?

Indian Summer - Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

I have strayed from silent places,
Where the days are dreaming always;

The Alice Jean - Robert Graves

One moonlit night a ship drove in,
    A ghost ship from the west,
Drifting with bare mast and lone tiller,
    Like a mermaid drest
In long green weed and barnacles:
    She beached and came to rest.

All the watchers of the coast
    Flocked to view the sight,
Men and women streaming down
    Through the summer night,
Found her standing tall and ragged
    Beached in the moonlight.

Then one old woman looked and wept
    “The ‘Alice Jean’? But no!
The ship that took my Dick from me
    Sixty years ago
Drifted back from the utmost west
    With the ocean’s flow?

“Caught and caged in the weedy pool
    Beyond the western brink,
Where crewless vessels lie and rot
    in waters black as ink.
Torn out again by a sudden storm
    Is it the ‘Jean’, you think?”

A hundred women stared agape,
    The menfolk nudged and laughed,
But none could find a likelier story
    For the strange craft.
With fear and death and desolation
    Rigged fore and aft.

The blind ship came forgotten home
    To all but one of these
Of whom none dared to climb aboard her:
    And by and by the breeze
Sprang to a storm and the “Alice Jean”
    Foundered in frothy seas.

---

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) England

A Red, Red Rose - Robert Burns

O my luve's like a red, red rose,
    That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like the melodie
    That's sweetly played in tune.

A Psalm Of Life - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.

Penelope - Dorothy Parker

In the pathway of the sun,

Ghazal - Muhammad din Tilai

The world is fainting,
And you will weep at last.

We Wear the Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

Mirabeau Bridge - Guillaume Apollinaire

Under Mirabeau bridge runs the Seine

The Rose That Grew From Concrete - Tupac Shakur

Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?

Sonnet - C. S. Lewis

The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall
About a dreaming garden still and sweet

The Train Of Life - Edmund William Gosse

We traced the bleak ridge, to and fro,
Grave forty, gay fourteen;
While yellow larks, in heaven's blue glow,
Like laughing stars were seen,
And rose-tipp'd larches, fringed below,
Shone fabulously green.

My Idle Dreams Roam Far (Gazing at the South) - Li Yu

My idle dreams roam far,

Crossing the bar - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
   And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
   When I put out to sea,

Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

---

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) England

Johnny Fife and Johnny's Wife - Mildred Plew Meigs

Oh, Johnny Fife and Johnny's wife
To save their toes and heels,
They built themselves a little house
That ran on rolling wheels.

The Cats Have Come To Tea - Kate Greenaway

What did she see–oh, what did she see,
As she stood leaning against the tree?
Why all the Cats had come to tea.

Water Fantasy - Fannie Stearns Davis

O brown brook, O blithe brook, what will you say to me
If I take off my heavy shoon and wade you childishly?

The Girl - Boris Pasternak

                                            By a cliff a golden cloud once lingered;
                                            On his breast it slept...

Everybody Tells Me Everything - Ogden Nash

I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.

Winter Song - Wilfred Owen

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven;

One Flower - Jack Kerouac

One flower
     on the cliffside
Nodding at the canyon

---

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) USA

Gentle Lady, Do Not Sing - James Joyce

XXVIII

Gentle lady, do not sing

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind - William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Entreaty - Abdul Ghani Khan

I do not need your red sculpted lips,

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.