Famous Short Wife Poems
Famous Short Wife Poems. Short Wife Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Wife short poems
by
Pablo Neruda
O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
from the long stem of the trampled bush
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable, elusive, desolate
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea.
by
Gwendolyn Brooks
Now who could take you off to tiny life
In one room or in two rooms or in three
And cork you smartly, like the flask of wine
You are? Not any woman.
Not a wife.
You'd let her twirl you, give her a good glee
Showing your leaping ruby to a friend.
Though twirling would be meek.
Since not a cork
Could you allow, for being made so free.
A woman would be wise to think it well
If once a week you only rang the bell.
by
Allen Ginsberg
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home.
by
Walt Whitman
AMONG the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I
am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.
by
Paul Muldoon
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
by
Jonathan Swift
Charming oysters I cry:
My masters, come buy,
So plump and so fresh,
So sweet is their flesh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister:
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle:
They'll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad;
And madam your wife
They'll please to the life;
Be she barren, be she old,
Be she slut, or be she scold,
Eat my oysters, and lie near her,
She'll be fruitful, never fear her.
by
Thomas Hardy
I
Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.
II
But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her -
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her -
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her.
by
Nazim Hikmet
Today is Sunday.
For the first time they took me out into the sun today.
And for the first time in my life I was aghast
that the sky is so far away
and so blue
and so vast
I stood there without a motion.
Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion
leaning against the white wall.
Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll
Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now.
The soil, the sun and me.
.
.
I feel joyful and how.
by
Oscar Wilde
I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.
For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.
by
Russell Edson
A toy-maker made a toy wife and a toy child.
He made a toy house and some toy years.
He made a getting-old toy, and he made a dying
toy.
The toy-maker made a toy heaven and a toy god.
But, best of all, he liked making toy shit.
by
Mother Goose
Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well.
by
Anna Akhmatova
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.
Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.
Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk's torn off.
Maybe it's better I did not become
Your wife.
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it? -- Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.
by
Edgar Lee Masters
In my life I was the town drunkard;
When I died the priest denied me burial
In holy ground.
The which rebounded to my good fortune.
For the Protestants bought this lot,
And buried my body here,
Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas,
And of his wife Priscilla.
Take note, ye prudent and pious souls,
Of the cross-currents in life
Which bring honor to the dead, who lived in shame.
by
Yehuda Amichai
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons.
All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers.
All of them.
A pity.
We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
by
Thomas Hardy
I
Last year I called this world of gain-givings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs
The tragedy of things.
II
Yet at that censured time no heart was rent
Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter
By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter;
Death waited Nature's wont; Peace smiled unshent
From Ind to Occident.
by
Lisa Zaran
All around me, the sky with its deep shade of dark.
The stars.
The moon with its shrunken soul.
Can I become what I want to become?
Neither wife or mother.
I am noone and nobody is my lover.
I am afraid
that when I go mad,
my father will bow his downy head
into his silver wings and weep.
My daughter, O my daughter.
Originally Published in The 2River View, 10.
1, 2005
Copyright © Lisa Zaran, 2005
by
Louise Gluck
In the end, I made myself
Known to your wife as
A god would, in her own house, in
Ithaca, a voice
Without a body: she
Paused in her weaving, her head turning
First to the right, then left
Though it was hopeless of course
To trace that sound to any
Objective source: I doubt
She will return to her loom
With what she knows now.
When
You see her again, tell her
This is how a god says goodbye:
If I am in her head forever
I am in your life forever.
by
Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone.
It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail.
And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing.
You did, you loved, your feet
are sore.
It's dusk.
Your daughter's tall.
by
Ellis Parker Butler
I hold her letter as I stand,
Nor break the seal; no need to guess
What dainty little female hand
Penned this most delicate address.
The scented seal—I break it not,
But stand in stormy revery;
I tremble as I wonder what
She who penned this will say to me.
I wonder what my wife will say
If so it be she e’er shall know
I only mailed her note today—
It should have gone two weeks ago!
by
Yosa Buson
He's on the porch,
to escape the wife and kids--
how hot it is!
by
Stevie Smith
Drugs made Pauline vague.
She sat one day at the breakfast table
Fingering in a baffled way
The fronds of the maidenhair plant.
Was it the salt you were looking for dear?
said Dulcie, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier.
Chuff chuff Pauline what's the matter?
Said the Brigadier to his wife
Who did not even notice
What a handsome couple they made.
by
Edna St Vincent Millay
As I sat down by Saddle Stream
To bathe my dusty feet there,
A boy was standing on the bridge
Any girl would meet there.
As I went over Woody Knob
And dipped into the hollow,
A youth was coming up the hill
Any maid would follow.
Then in I turned at my own gate,—
And nothing to be sad for—
To such a man as any wife
Would pass a pretty lad for.
by
Louise Gluck
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken.
The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
by
Dorothy Parker
Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one .
.
.
Lady, lady, better run!
by
Robert Herrick
Scobble for whoredom whips his wife and cries
He'll slit her nose; but blubbering she replies,
"Good sir, make no more cuts i' th' outward skin,
One slit's enough to let adultery in.