A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

And there to lie down in the lap of the late autumn evening
homey small-kissing on some crazy quilt mother made me
how is it with you when you go and our lives go unbraided
my heart go torn with the old wild grief
how is it you rise and I rise [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

Setting this down for you to keep
(White snows deepen the white night)
When you are gone from me in sleep.
Still the night deepens and the deep
Muffles your face, the face of forms from sight
Setting this down for you. To keep
This human faith with you I steep
These words, and not [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
(for Robert Evans)
Sunburned and blonde the fresh insouciance,
That quarter of the solar year comes round
When some will keep and some will quit this ground.
Your leaving reaves us,
Leaves us less a lance.
Go where you will, you go with Fergus now,
Far from the deans, where minutes are not kept
Where sleep [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
When Matthew Paris wrought to write
The Lives of all the early abbots,
He rove by rush and tallow light.
By his scriptorium mailed feet
And tumbrels knocking in the street
Worked further wrongs; the herded night
Advanced on sandal and sabot.
That men should sing in praise of kings
To set them on some middle [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Wade Jennings)

1

There is a kind of sweet distress
In children dancing out of time;
Attendant on that awkwardness
A mute unsureness, a duress
Whose only succor is finesse;
It is as though
They know,
Sensing the aisles’ restlessness,
Though it stand only for a time
And though
It be blameless
It be nameless,
Still
They count it as [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg
from Ancient Letters (1987)
 
After the last trick had been turned in the game,
The bumpers drunk, the galley fallen apart;
The lying maid having drunk to a different name
A cup for the journey, so to speak, at the start;
One wonders whether that harried dame ever thought
In terms of that fat man she and [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg
 
 
One wonders whom the next elected
Criminal for these troubled times
Will the feckless public, suspect,
Lever in the long direction
(Between the last war and the next)
We take in our quotidian crimes;
How long our matrons skirt the leering
Lawless on main ways to market;
How long our aged folk in fear
Imprisoned at their portals peering
On them [...]

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A Set of Poems by Thomas Thornburg
Poor Eddie Poe
collapsed in the snow
and exhaled no more
in old Baltimore.
Poor Mary Mallon
wept o’er many a gallon
of soapsuds, avoiding
the cops, and typhoiding.
W. B. Yeats
believed in the fates,
but on Sunday
in Spiritus Mundi.
Fenimore Cooper
did not make a trooper,
but wrote some novels
about hovels.
Geoffrey Chaucer
wore a hat like a saucer
and [...]

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A poem by Stan Raines
I see him, Lord of the Porch,
And all that he surveyed,
Weaving a web of words
From the old world,
The old, old world,
Raising again the cry
Of man against injustice
Of man against man,
And smack and smack and smack
The shaggy heads of school boys,
Errant bullies, and school men alike
With the All that had not changed
Not [...]

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