CAST a bronze of my head and legs and put them on the king’s street.
Set the cast of me here alongside Carl XII, making two Carls for the Swedish people and the utlanders to look at between the palace and the Grand Hotel.
The summer sun will... (Read full poem)

2. Muckers - written by Carl Sandburg
From Chicago Poems. Published in 1912. Read 3272 times on American Poems.

TWENTY men stand watching the muckers.
Stabbing the sides of the ditch
Where clay gleams yellow,
Driving the blades of their shovels
Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains
Wiping sweat off their faces
With red bandanas
The muckers work on . .... (Read full poem)

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our... (Read full poem)

4. The Defective Record - written by William Carlos Williams
From The Complete Collected Poems 1906-1938. Published in 1938. Read 2211 times on American Poems.

Cut the bank for the fill.
Dump sand
pumped out of the river
into the old swale

killing whatever was
there before—including
even the muskrats. Who did it?
There's the guy.

Him in the blue shirt and
turquoise skullcap.
Level it down
for him... (Read full poem)

BY the City Dead-House, by the gate, 
As idly sauntering, wending my way from the clangor, 
I curious pause—for lo! an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought; 
Her corpse they deposit unclaim’d—it lies on the damp brick... (Read full poem)

6. The Gift - written by Li-Young Lee
From Rose. Published in 1986. Read 3165 times on American Poems.

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but... (Read full poem)

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But... (Read full poem)

8. Sudden Things - written by Donald Hall
Read 1453 times on American Poems.

A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, full of children and old people. The lion was loose. Either... (Read full poem)

The bird that feeds from off my palm
Is sleek, affectionate, and calm,
But double, to me, is worth the thrush
A-flickering in the elder-bush.(Read full poem)

10. The Props assist the House - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 1980 times on American Poems.

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter --
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life --
A past of Plank and... (Read full poem)

Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for 
a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with... (Read full poem)

12. The House on the Hill - written by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Read 4987 times on American Poems.

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to... (Read full poem)

The press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked,
And I was tarred and feathered,
For publishing this on the day the Anarchists were hanged in Chicago:
"I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes
Standing on the steps of a marble temple.
Great... (Read full poem)

14. Neighbors - written by Carl Sandburg
From Smoke and Steel. Published in 1922. Read 2956 times on American Poems.

ON Forty First Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.
  
If houses went on crutches
this house would be
one of the cripples.
  
A sign on the house:
Church of the Living God
And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.
  
From a Greek coffee... (Read full poem)

There's been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today --
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have -- alway --

The Neighbors rustle in and out --
The Doctor -- drives away --
A Window opens like a Pod --
Abrupt -- mechanically... (Read full poem)

16. Lorena - written by Lucille Clifton
Read 534 times on American Poems.

it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted
on itself, how it was master
of the man, how it measured him, never
was ignored or denied, and how it promised
there would be sweetness... (Read full poem)

On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire... (Read full poem)

18. The House - written by Charles Bukowski
Read 1950 times on American Poems.

They are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
listening to the sounds,
the hammers pounding in nails,
thack thack thack thack,
and then I hear birds,
and thack thack thack,
and I go to bed,
I pull the covers to... (Read full poem)

Soil of Flint, if steady tilled --
Will refund by Hand --
Seed of Palm, by Libyan Sun
Fructified in Sand --(Read full poem)

20. The House Of Dust: Introduction - written by Conrad Aiken
From The House of Dust. Published in 1917. Read 2230 times on American Poems.

THE HOUSE OF DUST
A Symphony

BY
CONRAD AIKEN

To Jessie

NOTE

. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . . I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the... (Read full poem)

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a... (Read full poem)

22. supposing i dreamed this)... (IX) - written by e.e. cummings
Read 12857 times on American Poems.

supposing i dreamed this)
only imagine,when day has thrilled
you are a house around which
i am a wind-

your walls will not reckon how
strangely my life is curved
since the best he can do
is to peer through windows,unobserved

-listen,for(out of... (Read full poem)

Take a hold now
On the silver handles here,
Six silver handles,
One for each of his old pals.

Take hold
And lift him down the stairs,
Put him on the rollers
Over the floor of the hearse.

Take him on the last haul,
To the cold straight... (Read full poem)

24. Too little way the House must lie - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 1505 times on American Poems.

Too little way the House must lie
From every Human Heart
That holds in undisputed Lease
A white inhabitant --

Too narrow is the Right between --
Too imminent the chance --
Each Consciousness must emigrate
And lose its neighbor once --(Read full poem)

So what use was poetry
to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
in by the fire.

And when your tree
crashed through your house,

what use then
was all your power?

It was the use of you.
It was the flower.(Read full poem)