| The Approaching Hour | |
| by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems, Volume II, 1939-1962) | |
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You Communists and Republicans! all you Germans and Frenchmen! you corpses and quickeners! The stars are about to melt and fall on you in tears. Get ready! Get ready! you Papists and Protestants! you whores and you virtuous! The moon will be bread and drop presently into your baskets. Friends and those who despise and detest us! Adventists and those who believe nothing! Get ready for the awakening. |
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| The Mind’s Games | |
| by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems, Volume II, 1939-1962) | |
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If a man can say of his life or any moment of his life, There is nothing more to be desired! his state becomes like that told in the famous double sonnet--but without the sonnet’s restrictions. Let him go look at the river flowing or the bank of late flowers, there will be one small fly still among the petals in whose gauzy wings raised above its back a rainbow shines. The world to him is radiant and even the fact of poverty is wholly without despair. So it seems until these rouse to him pictures of the systematically starved--for a purpose, at the mind’s proposal. What good then the light winged fly, the flower or the river--too foul to drink of or even to bathe in? The 90 story building beyond the ocean that a rocket will span for destruction in a matter of minutes but will not bring him, in a century, food or relief of any sort from his suffering. The world too much with us? Rot! the world is not half enough with us-- the rot of a potato with a healthy skin, a rot that is never revealed till we are about to eat--and it revolts us. Beauty? Beauty should make us paupers, should blind us, rob us--for it does not feed the sufferer but makes his suffering a fly-blown putrescence and ourselves decay--unless the ecstasy be general. |
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| Election Day | |
| by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems, Volume II, 1939-1962) | |
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Warm sun, quiet air an old man sits in the doorway of a broken house-- boards for windows plaster falling from between the stones and strokes the head of a spotted dog 
With thanks to Halvard Johnson, who posted these poems to the Newpoetry list for Election Day 2004.... All three are from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II, 1939-1962 (New Directions, 1986).... Compare prices to buy the book. |
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Next page > “Election Year” by Jim Finnegan... |
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