1. As At Thy Portals Also Death. - written by Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass. Published in 1900. Read 3069 times on American Poems.

AS at thy portals also death, 
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds, 
To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity, 
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me, 
(I see again the calm benignant face fresh... (Read full poem)

. . . telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,—

repeating, chanting,
Oh yeah   Oh yeah   Oh yeah   Oh yeah   Oh yeah

until, as if in darkness he craved the sun,... (Read full poem)

3. Portals. - written by Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass. Published in 1900. Read 2116 times on American Poems.

WHAT are those of the known, but to ascend and enter the Unknown? 
And what are those of life, but for Death?(Read full poem)

To think to know the country and now know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
As often as I've seen it done before
I can't pretend to tell the way it's done.
It looks as if some magic of the... (Read full poem)

5. Common Cold - written by Ogden Nash
Read 5915 times on American Poems.

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common... (Read full poem)

Henry got me with child, 
Knowing that I could not bring forth life 
Without losing my own. 
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust. 
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived 
That Henry loved me with a husband's... (Read full poem)

7. Interrupting An Addict - written by Lee Upton
Read 363 times on American Poems.

An afternoon inlaid with fog
like a little fishing village. 

Did I come at the wrong time?
Knicked with knife and soaked overnight, 

your thinking came out curved—
a paisley. I was hacking my way 

through creepers
at a defunct railroad... (Read full poem)

Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways, 
Between the rivers and the illumined sky 
Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high 
Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze. 
They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face 
Her suitors follow,... (Read full poem)

9. The Swarm - written by Sylvia Plath
From The Collected Poems. Published in 1962. Read 2496 times on American Poems.

Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba... (Read full poem)

Great master!  Boyish, sympathetic man!
Whose orbed and ripened genius lightly hung
From life's slim, twisted tendril and there swung
In crimson-sphered completeness; guardian
Of crystal portals through whose openings fan
The spiced winds... (Read full poem)

11. The Pleiades - written by Amy Lowell
From A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Read 2044 times on American Poems.

By day you cannot see the sky
For it is up so very high.
You look and look, but it's so blue
That you can never see right through.
But when night comes it is quite plain,
And all the stars are there again.
They seem just like old friends to... (Read full poem)

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example 
of a life without... (Read full poem)

13. One Anguish -- in a Crowd -- - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 1472 times on American Poems.

One Anguish -- in a Crowd --
A Minor thing -- it sounds --
And yet, unto the single Doe
Attempted of the Hounds

'Tis Terror as consummate
As Legions of Alarm
Did leap, full flanked, upon the Host --
'Tis Units -- make the Swarm --

A Small Leech --... (Read full poem)

Hover 
the imagined center, our tongues 
grew long to please it, licking 

the walls, a chamber built of scent, 

a moment followed by a lesser moment 
& a hunger to return. It couldn't last. Resin 

flowed glacially from wounds in the bark 
pinned... (Read full poem)

15. A Prayer in Spring - written by Robert Frost
From A Boy's Will. Published in 1913. Read 22207 times on American Poems.

OH, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orcahrd white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts... (Read full poem)

Be careful of words, 
even the miraculous ones. 
For the miraculous we do our best, 
sometimes they swarm like insects 
and leave not a sting but a kiss. 
They can be as good as fingers. 
They can be as trusty as the rock 
you stick your bottom on.... (Read full poem)

17. Douglass - written by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Read 3236 times on American Poems.

Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days, 
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know, 
When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago 
Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways, 
And all the country heard thee with amaze. 
Not ended then, the... (Read full poem)

28 July
                                   
Calmly, while sat up friendlies & made noise
delight fuller than he can ready sing
or studiously say,
on hearing that the year had swung to pause
and culminated in an abundant thing,
came his... (Read full poem)

19. What Best I See In Thee. - written by Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass. Published in 1900. Read 3086 times on American Poems.

WHAT best I see in thee, 
Is not that where thou mov’st down history’s great highways, 
Ever undimm’d by time shoots warlike victory’s dazzle, 
Or that thou sat’st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace, 
Or thou the... (Read full poem)

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lined and shaped like a teacup.
                               A step
down and you're into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then... (Read full poem)

21. Apples of Hesperides - written by Amy Lowell
From A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Read 3009 times on American Poems.

Glinting golden through the trees,
Apples of Hesperides!
Through the moon-pierced warp of night
Shoot pale shafts of yellow light,
Swaying to the kissing breeze
Swings the treasure, golden-gleaming,
Apples of Hesperides!
Far and lofty yet... (Read full poem)

The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once.
—What happen then, Mr Bones?
if be you cares to say.
—Henry. Henry became interested in women's bodies,
his loins were & were the    scene of stupendous achievement.
Stupor.... (Read full poem)

23. Phenomenal Woman - written by Maya Angelou
Read 171246 times on American Poems.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my... (Read full poem)

Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
and found the world unkind,
my dearest faith has been that this
is but a trial: I shall be changed.
In my imaginings I have already spent
my brooding winter... (Read full poem)

25. My Name Is Judith - written by Judy Grahn
From Work of a Common Woman. Published in 1977. Read 731 times on American Poems.

My name is Judith, meaning
She Who Is Praised
I do not want to be called praised
I want to be called The Power of Love.

if Love means protect then whenever I do not
defend you
I cannot call my name Love.
if Love means rebirth then when I see... (Read full poem)