Poems Flashcards
Ozymandias
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert
A shattered visage lies
cold command
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
My name is Ozymandias king of kings
Look on my works ye mighty and despair
Nothing besides remains
Boundless and bare
lone and level
London
I wander through each chartered street
Near where the charted Themes does flow
Marks of weakness marks of war
In every infants cry of fear
The mind forged manacles I hear
How the chimney sweepers cry
The hapless soldiers sight
Runs in blood down palace walls
Blights with plagues the marriage hearse
The Prelude
(led by her) (personification of nature)
It was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure
like one who rows, proud of his skill, to reach a certain point with an unswerving line
in grave and serious mood
My last Duchess
Looking as if she were alive
A heart how shall I say too soon made glad
As if she ranked my gift of 900 years old name with anybody’s gift
then all smiles stopped together
Noticed Neptune though taming a sea horse
The charge of the light brigade
Repetition of 600 at the end of stanzas
Someone had blunder’d
theirs not to make reply, /theirs not to reason why, /theirs but to do or die, /into the valley of death
into the jams of death
while horse and hero fell
honour the charge they made/honour the light brigade
Exposure
the merciless iced east winds that knive us
The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams
Slowly our ghosts drag home
Storm on the Island
This wisened earth has never troubled us
when it blows full /Blast
leaves and branches can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
Forgetting that it pummels your house too
Exploding comfortably down the cliffs
spits like a tame cat turned savage
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear
Remains
one of them legs it up the road
probably armed, possibly not
Well myself and somebody else and somebody else are all of the same mind
it rips through his life
tosses his guts back into his body
End of story, except not really
And the drink and drugs won’t flush him out
he’s here in my head when I close my eyes, dug in behind enemy lines
his bloody life in my bloody hands
Poppies
Steel the softening of my face
all my words flattened, rolled, turned into felt
the world overflowing like a treasure chest
A split second and you were away, intoxicated
released a song bird from its cage
I listened, hoping to hear your playground voice catching in the wind
War photographer
spools of suffering
set out in ordered rows
as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a mass
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to now
a half-formed ghost
to do what someone must
A hundred agonies in black-and-white from which his editor will pick out five or six
The readers eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers
and they do not care
Tissue
Paper that lets the light shine through
where a hand has written in the names and histories
this/ is what could alter things
might fly our lives like paper kites
how easily they fall away on a sigh,’ ‘turned into your skin
The Emigree
but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants
but I am branded by an impression of sunlight
the frontiers rise between us, close like waves
like a hollow doll
I comb its hair and love its shining eyes
They accuse me of being dark in their free city
Checking Out Me History
Dem tell me
Bandage up me eye with me own history
Toussaint de beacon of de Haitian Revolution
fire-woman struggle hopeful stream to freedom river
a healing star among the wounded a yellow sunrise to the dying
But now I checking out me own history I carving out me identity
Kamikaze
Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water, a samurai sword
enough fuel for a one-way journey into history
on a green blue translucent sea
and remembered how he and his brothers waiting on the shore
they treated him as though he no longer existed
till gradually we too learned… that this was no longer the father we loved
And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die
