Tuesday, November 30, 2010

My 10 Favorite Poems

  • Tommy – Rudyard Kipling
  • The Last Leaf – Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • So, We’ll Go No More a Roving – Lord Byron
  • Pioneers! O Pioneers! – Walt Whitman
  • Cows – Paul Muldoon
  • The Song of Hiawatha – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen
  • Upon learning that a town exists called Upperville –John Updike
  • The Raven – Edgar Allan Poe
  • Let Evening Come –Jane Kenyon

The last one is quite a treasure and wonderfully soothing. See for yourself:

Let Evening Come – Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

1 comment:

  1. A nice, varied list. And I didn't know the Kenyon poem--somewhere between a prayer, a lullaby, and a blessing--beautiful, thanks.

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