Ambrose Bierce Poems

To him in whom the love of Nature has
Imperfectly supplanted the desire
And dread necessity of food, your shore,
Fair Oakland, is a terror. Over all
Your sunny level, from Tamaletown
To where the Pestuary's fragrant slime,
With dead dogs studded, bears its ailing fleet,
...

In fair San Francisco a good man did dwell,
And he wrote out a will, for he didn't feel well.
Said he: 'It is proper, when making a gift,
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I stood upon a hill. The setting sun
Was crimson with a curse and a portent,
And scarce his angry ray lit up the land
That lay below, whose lurid gloom appeared
Freaked with a moving mist, which, reeking up
...

From the regions of the Night,
Coming with recovered sight
From the spell of darkness free,
What will Danenhower see?
...

Some one ('tis hardly new) has oddly said
The color of a trumpet's blare is red;
And Joseph Emmett thinks the crimson shame
On woman's cheek a trumpet-note of fame.
...

Despots effete upon tottering thrones
Unsteadily poised upon dead men's bones,
Walk up! walk up! the circus is free,
And this wonderful spectacle you shall see:
Millions of voters who mostly are fools
...

John S. Hittell, whose sovereign genius wields
The quill his tributary body yields;
The author of an opera-that is,
All but the music and libretto's his:
A work renowned, whose formidable name,
...

'Ours is a Christian Army'; so he said
A regiment of bangomen who led.
'And ours a Christian Navy,' added he
Who sailed a thunder-junk upon the sea.
Better they know than men unwarlike do
What is an army and a navy, too.
...

As through the blue expanse he skims
On joyous wings, the late
Frank Hutchings overtakes Miss Sims,
Both bound for Heaven's high gate.
...

Alas, alas, for the tourist's guide!
He turned from the beaten trail aside,
Wandered bewildered, lay down and died.
...