I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
–Seamus Heaney
In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. He was born in Northern Ireland, but spent his later years in Dublin.
As the mist leaves no scar
on the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
–Leonard Cohen
He stands in the doorway of his house
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.
–Patrick Kavanagh
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair –
The bees are stirring – birds on the wing –
And Winter slumbering in the open air
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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…
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
–Edwin Arlington Robinson
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
--John Masefield
What are the names of the angels
and the birds? My memories swarm
round like confused flies. Among
the dead, I cherish most myself.
–Keith Flynn
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
--Ezra Poundvia Poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 – 1822
via Valentine’s Day Poem.
