Conscription Camp (Karl Shapiro Poems)
Your landscape sickens with a dry diseaseEven in May, Virginia, and your sweet pinesLike Frenchmen runted in a hundred warsAre ...
Karl Shapiro Poems (21 Poems)
I Am An Atheist Who Says His Prayers (Karl Shapiro Poems)
I am an atheist who says his prayers.I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the ...
The Intellectual (Karl Shapiro Poems)
What should the wars do with these jigging fools?The man behind the book may not be man,His own man or ...
Aside (Karl Shapiro Poems)
Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches, And all ...
The Fly (Karl Shapiro Poems)
O hideous little bat, the size of snot,With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,To populate the stinking cat you walkThe promontory ...
University (Karl Shapiro Poems)
To hurt the Negro and avoid the JewIs the curriculum. In mid-SeptemberThe entering boys, identified by hats,Wander in a maze ...
The Dome Of Sunday (Karl Shapiro Poems)
With focus sharp as Flemish-painted faceIn film of varnish brightly fixedAnd through a polished hand-lens deeply seen,Sunday at noon through ...
Troop Train (Karl Shapiro Poems)
It stops the town we come through. Workers raiseTheir oily arms in good salute and grin.Kids scream as at a ...
California Winter (Karl Shapiro Poems)
It is winter in California, and outsideIs like the interior of a florist shop:A chilled and moisture-laden cropOf pink camellias ...
Editing (Karl Shapiro Poems)
Next to my office where I edit poems ("Can poems be edited?") there is the Chicago Models club. All day ...
The Conscientious Objector (Karl Shapiro Poems)
The gates clanged and they walked you into jailMore tense than felons but relieved to findThe hostile world shut out, ...
Buick (Karl Shapiro Poems)
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spineAnd a keel as steel as a root ...
Sunday: New Guinea (Karl Shapiro Poems)
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers, The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn, From every side, singly, in groups, ...
The Alphabet (Karl Shapiro Poems)
The letters of the Jews as strict as flamesOr little terrible flowers leanStubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,Singing through solid ...
Love for a Hand (Karl Shapiro Poems)
Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,And soon down ladders of reflected lightThe sleepers climb in silence. GraduallyThey ...
Going to School (Karl Shapiro Poems)
What shall I teach in the vivid afternoonWith the sun warming the blackboard and a slipOf cloud catching my eye?Only ...
The Piano Tuner’s Wife (Karl Shapiro Poems)
That note comes clear, like water running clear,Then the next higher note, and up and upAnd more and more, with ...
A Garden In Chicago (Karl Shapiro Poems)
In the mid-city, under an oiled sky, I lay in a garden of such dusky green It seemed the dregs ...
Manhole Covers (Karl Shapiro Poems)
The beauty of manhole covers--what of that? Like medals struck by a great savage khan, Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, ...
The Olive Tree (Karl Shapiro Poems)
Save for a lusterless honing-stone of moon The sky stretches its flawless canopy Blue as the blue silk of the ...
Love for a Hand (Karl Shapiro Poem)
Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white, And soon down ladders of reflected light The sleepers climb in ...