Free Poems and If We Must Die Poem for Inspiration

    I know how difficult I’ve made your life
Now that you’ve brought home another father.
You have your new dominion as a wife
While I still mourn the absence of the other.
And yet I recognize your right to choose
The man you love, whatever I might feel.
Life is not a game to win or lose:
For that the pain on both sides is too real.
It therefore is my place to make a place
Within my heart for one who lives in yours.
There is no way to do this but with grace,
For one must be at home with open doors.
Please forgive the failure of my love.
Your love for me should mine for your love move.    

   My face is an icon, my life a scrim

Alight with meaning, my words inscribed
Reductively in stone, a hymn
To dreams annually revived.
In me you found a founding father
New, like Lincoln a colossus
Late arrived: righteous Other,
Unavenging nemesis,
The token nigger of American
Heroes, aggrieved but restrained,
Engaged but non-partisan,
Radical but house-trained.
Know that I still believe in you,
In spite of what you’ve done to me.
Nor can a holiday a truth
Give flesh long flayed by memory.   

   Now, if I fall, will it be my lot
To be cast in some lone, and lowly spot,
To melt, and to sink, unseen, or forgot?
And there will my course be ended?”
‘T was this a feathery Snow-Flake said,
As down through measureless space it strayed,
Or, as half by dalliance, half afraid,
It seemed in mid air suspended.

“Oh! no,” said the Earth, “thou shalt not lie
Neglected and lone on my lap to die,
Thou pure and delicate child of the sky!
For, thou wilt be safe in my keeping.
But then, I must give thee a lovelier form—
Thou wilt not be part of the wintry storm,
But revive,when the sunbeams are yellow and warm,
And the flowers from my bosom are peeping!    

   What heart could have thought you? —
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?

Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapor? —
“God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapor,
To lust of His mind —
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.    

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.     

   The snow-flakes, the snow-flakes,

The children of the sky—
How silently they come to earth
From their sweet home on high.

The snow-flakes, the snow flakes,
An angel band are they,
Array’d in robes of spotless white,
To cheer the winter day.

The snow-flakes, the snow-flakes
Their coming is a joy,
A promise sweet of blessedness
To many a happy boy.

The snow-flakes, the snow-flakes,
They cover all the earth,
And fill the maiden’s heart with thoughts
Of happiness and mirth.

The snow-flakes, the snow-flakes,
The sturdy farmer’s eye
Is lit up with a brighter joy
To see them in the sky!

The snow-flakes, the snow-flakes,
An angel band are they,
Array’d in robes of spotless white,
To cheer the winter day.   

     Tiny little snowflakes,

In the air so high,
Are you little angels,
Floating in the sky?
Robed so white and spotless,
Flying like a dove,
Are you little creatures,
From the world above?

Whirling on the sidewalk,
Dancing in the street,
Kissing all the faces
Of the children sweet,
Loading all the housetops,
Powdering all the trees,—
Cunning little snowflakes,
Little busy bees!   

    If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!    

   Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.