1. The Black Art - written by Anne Sexton
Read 3768 times on American Poems.

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear... (Read full poem)

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost... (Read full poem)

3. As Children bid the Guest "Good Night" - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 4065 times on American Poems.

As Children bid the Guest "Good Night"
And then reluctant turn --
My flowers raise their pretty lips --
Then put their nightgowns on.

As children caper when they wake
Merry that it is Morn --
My flowers from a hundred cribs
Will peep, and prance... (Read full poem)

When I think of the many people
who privately despise children,
I can't say I'm completely shocked,

having been one. I was not
exceptional, uncomfortable as that is
to admit, and most children are not

exceptional. The particulars... (Read full poem)

5. Children - written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
From Birds Of Passage. Read 3384 times on American Poems.

Come to me, O ye children!
For I hear you at your play,
And the questions that perplexed me
Have vanished quite away.

Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows
And the brooks of morning... (Read full poem)

Orange blossoms blowing over Castile
children begging for coins

I met my love under an orange tree
or was it an acacia tree
or was he not my love?

I read this, then I dreamed this:
can waking take back what happened to me?
Bells of San... (Read full poem)

7. Listen Children - written by Lucille Clifton
Read 1770 times on American Poems.

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways

we have never hated black

listen
we have been ashamed
hopeless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us

we have always loved each other
children... (Read full poem)

IN a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street … faces … coffee spots … children kicking at the night stars with bare toes from bare buttocks.
They know it is September on Rivington when the red tomaytoes cram the pushcarts,
Here the... (Read full poem)

9. The Dead Village - written by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Read 555 times on American Poems.

Here there is death. But even here, they say, 
Here where the dull sun shines this afternoon 
As desolate as ever the dead moon 
Did glimmer on dead Sardis, men were gay; 
And there were little children here to play,
With small soft hands that... (Read full poem)

Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
For I raised a brood of eagles
Who flew away at last, leaving... (Read full poem)

11. A Peck of Gold - written by Robert Frost
From West-Running Brook. Published in 1928. Read 8535 times on American Poems.

Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.

All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like god in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some... (Read full poem)

JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight children
and the woman died and the children grew up... (Read full poem)

13. The Children of the Night - written by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Read 795 times on American Poems.

For those that never know the light, 
The darkness is a sullen thing; 
And they, the Children of the Night, 
Seem lost in Fortune's winnowing. 

But some are strong and some are weak, -- 
And there's the story. House and home 
Are shut from... (Read full poem)

LET it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone.
  
Time runs with an ax and a hammer, time slides down the hallways with a pass-key and a master-key, and time gets... (Read full poem)

15. Child - written by Carl Sandburg
From Chicago Poems. Published in 1916. Read 4021 times on American Poems.

The young child, Christ, is straight and wise
And asks questions of the old men, questions
Found under running water for all children
And found under shadows thrown on still waters
By tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled.
Found to the... (Read full poem)

Jean, death comes close to us all,
flapping its awful wings at us
and the gluey wings crawl up our nose.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle,
mine pushed into gnawing a stilbestrol cancer
I passed on... (Read full poem)

17. Mrs. Charles Bliss - written by Edgar Lee Masters
Read 683 times on American Poems.

Reverend Wiley advised me not to divorce him
For the sake of the children,
And Judge Somers advised him the same.
So we stuck to the end of the path.
But two of the children thought he was right,
And two of the children thought I was... (Read full poem)

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love?  Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are... (Read full poem)

19. A Holiday - written by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Read 1061 times on American Poems.

The Wife
The house is like a garden,
The children are the flowers,
The gardener should come methinks
And walk among his bowers,
Oh! lock the door on worry
And shut your cares away,
Not time of year, but love and cheer,
Will make a... (Read full poem)

Children, I come back today 
To tell you a story of the long dark way 
That I had to climb, that I had to know 
In order that the race might live and grow. 
Look at my face -- dark as the night --  
Yet shining like the sun with love's true light.... (Read full poem)

21. Madam And Her Madam - written by Langston Hughes
Read 15913 times on American Poems.

I worked for a woman,
She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.

Had to get breakfast,
Dinner, and supper, too--
Then take care of her children
When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub,
Walk the dog around--
It was too... (Read full poem)

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers... (Read full poem)

23. A Happy Man - written by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Read 1505 times on American Poems.

When these graven lines you see, 
Traveller, do not pity me; 
Though I be among the dead, 
Let no mournful word be said.

Children that I leave behind, 
And their children, all were kind; 
Near to them and to my wife, 
I was happy all my... (Read full poem)

When the sky fell, the earth turned blue.
The trees, the tenements, the cars and buses
soaked up the sky and changed from outside in, in color,
to blue. The children ran frantically in adult directions. My wife,
dressed fashionably in blue, took my... (Read full poem)

25. Tradition, thou art for suckling children - written by Stephen Crane
From The Black Riders & Other Lines. Published in 1905. Read 2423 times on American Poems.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children,
Thou art the enlivening milk for babes;
But no meat for men is in thee.
Then --
But, alas, we all are babes.(Read full poem)