Don Marquis the tomcat At midnight in the alley

A tomcat comes to wail,

And he chants the hate of a million years

As he swings his snaky tail.

Malevolent, bony, brindled,

Tiger and devil and bard,

His eyes are coals from the middle of hell

And his heart is black and hard.

He twists and crouches and capers

And bares his curved sharp claws,

And he sings to the stars of the jungle nights

Ere cities were, or laws.

Beast from a world primeval,

He and his leaping clan,

When the blotched red moon leers over the roofs,

Give voice to their scorn of man.

He will lie on a rug tomorrow

And lick his silk fur,

And veil the brute in his yellow eyes,

And play he’s tame, and purr.

But at midnight in the alley

He will crouch again and wail,

And beat the time for his demon’s song

With the swing of his demon’s tail.

Theodore Roethke

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one:

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods:

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

John Masefield

Reynard the Fox

The fox was strong, he was full of running,

He could run for an hour and then be cunning,

But the cry behind him made him chill,

They were nearer now and they meant to kill.

They meant to run him until his blood

Clogged on his heart as his brush with mud,

Till he crouched stone-still, dead-beat and dirty,

With nothing but teeth against the thirty.

And all the way to that blinding end

He would meet with men and have none his friend:

Men to holloa and men to run him,

With stones to stagger and yells to stun him;

Men to head him, with whips to beat him.

And all the way, that wild high crying.

To cold his blood with the thought of dying,

The horn and the cheer, and the drum-like thunder

Of the horsehooves stamping the meadows under.

He upped his brush and went with a will

For the Sarsen Stones on Van Dyke Hill.