AChat Forum
Off-Topic => Quizz, Fav TV, Fav Music, Fav Films, Books... => Topic started by: Soniaslut on November 26, 2020, 11:18:06 AM
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Not a place for your own pomes...that's elsewhere in this forum. But a place to post verse that grabs you, means something to you, is funny, touching, epic or whatever reason you like. Post that poetry in here...
I'll start this with one from Dr. John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original ‘people’s poet’.
His unique poetry writing and rapidfire delivery style was recorded and put to music by lengederary producer Martin Hannett and a band of Mancunian superstars, such as Buzzcocks Pete Shelley and The Durutti Columns Vinnie Reilly.
JCC headlined gigs with support from many soon to be superstars including Joy Division, New Order and Duran Duran. He himself featured as special guest on many shows by the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and The Clash.
His poetry collection 10 Years in An Open Necked Shirt came out in the early 80s on Random House - Penguin, featuring the lyrics to his albums and more original material. It is one of the biggest selling poetry books in the UK.
Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents.
These days he performs purely as a stand up solo poet. His unique poetry show has been running in theatres worldwide for over 12 years.
BRONZE ADONIS
She didn’t like the rib cage, the coat-hanger hips.
The razor-sharp shoulder blades always give her jip.
She’s reading Edward De Bono under the palms.
He sprays Odorono under his arms.
I was, to say the least, alarmed
When the bronze Adonis got her.
I lay beneath the parasol watched him with the chicks.
Horsing around with his aerosol, they whispered about his odd trick.
“Send no cash… fear no man... you can be a love leviathan”.
She’s a fan of the man with a tan from a can.
The bronze Adonis got her.
Mr and Mrs Universe, the folks who live in the gym.
Each night she sleeps in a room marked her, he sleeps in a room marked him.
Muscle bound for stardom. The Apollo of your eye
Can’t seem to get a hard on; oh Christ I wonder why
The bronze Adonis got her.
They honeymoon on Muscle Beach to cries of “Beat it mac”.
He plucks some puny pansy’s peach - how do you like that?
The bronze Adonis got her.
There stands the body gorgeous. Men worship, girls admire.
He bravely bears the scourges and the squelch of squashed desire.
What a physical jerk - no time for sex.
Where’s me bleedin’ bullworker, baby oil and leopard kecks?
Oh yeah, the bronze Adonis got her.
Hubba hubba yum yum wow - what a hunk of beef.
Who made you the sacred cow - who hangs around his briefs?
In the corner sauna with his mates,
Wanking away unwanted weight.
That’s his idea of a heavy date.
The bronze Adonis got her
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Just for the natural things, simple and beautiful
I have always loved this
The Wood-Pile
BY ROBERT FROST
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
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Probably most recently popularised by the movie Interstellar this one is one of my favourite poems:
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
-
Song Of The Violet
William Makepeace Thackeray
1811-1863
A humble flower long time I pined
Upon the solitary plain,
And trembled at the angry wind,
And shrunk before the bitter rain.
And oh! 'twas in a blessed hour
A passing wanderer chanced to see,
And, pitying the lonely flower,
To stoop and gather me.
I fear no more the tempest rude,
On dreary heath no more I pine,
But left my cheerless solitude,
To deck the breast of Caroline.
Alas our days are brief at best,
Nor long I fear will mine endure,
Though shelter'd here upon a breast
So gentle and so pure.
It draws the fragrance from my leaves,
It robs me of my sweetest breath,
And every time it falls and heaves,
It warns me of my coming death.
But one I know would glad forego
All joys of life to be as I;
An hour to rest on that sweet breast,
And then, contented, die!
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Song Of The Violet
William Makepeace Thackeray
1811-1863
;D i enjoyed that VERY much, Thank you.
And here is one of MY favorite LOVE poems....
Kahlil Gibran ~ On LOVE
(1883 - 1931)
When love beckons to you, follow him,
though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth, so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
•
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
and then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure…
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of
love’s threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but
not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; for love is sufficient unto LOVE.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires…
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
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Die gestundete Zeit - Ingeborg Bachmann (originally in German)
There will be harder days coming.
The for revocation deffered time is appearing at the horizon.
Soon you gotta tie your shoes
and chase the dogs back into the marsh's yards
because the insides of the fish got cold in the wind
Poorly is burning the light of the lupines.
Your sight grooms in the fog.
The for revocation deffered time is appearing at the horizon.
Yonder, your loved one is sinking in the sand.
He treads around her wafting hair,
He's cutting her short.
He commands her to keep still.
He finds her mortal and willing to bid goodbye after every embracement.
Don't look around.
Tie your shoe.
Chase the dogs back.
Throw the fish into the sea.
Quench the lupines.
There will be harder days coming.
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(https://i.imgur.com/Zug9gNH.png?1)
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JUST DOING MY JOB
Clare Bevan
I'm one of Herod's Henchmen.
We don't have much to say,
We just charge through the audience
In a Henchman sort of way.
We all wear woolly helmets
To hide our hair and ears,
And Wellingtons sprayed silver
To match our tinfoil spears.
Our swords are made of cardboard
So blood will not be spilled
If we trip and stab a parent
When the hall's completely filled.
We don't look very scary,
We're mostly small and shy,
And some of us wear glasses,
But we give the thing a try.
We whisper Henchman noises
While Herod hunts for strangers,
And then we all charge out again
Like nervous Power Rangers.
Yet when the play is over
And Miss is out of breath
We'll charge like Henchmen through the hall
And scare our mums to death.
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I often think about this recently. It is not a happy one, but still...
It's not brave to smile in front of a loss, it's just easier sometimes.
Condolence
Poem By Dorothy Parker
They hurried here, as soon as you had died,
Their faces damp with haste and sympathy,
And pressed my hand in theirs, and smoothed my knee,
And clicked their tongues, and watched me, mournful-eyed.
Gently they told me of that Other Side-
How, even then, you waited there for me,
And what ecstatic meeting ours would be.
Moved by the lovely tale, they broke, and cried.
And when I smiled, they told me I was brave,
And they rejoiced that I was comforted,
And left to tell of all the help they gave.
But I had smiled to think how you, the dead,
So curiously preoccupied and grave,
Would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.
by Dorothy Parker
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That Deceitful Mouth
Don’t speak to me with that mouth
That deceitful mouth
Which lies while smiling to my face
Don’t speak through your weak mouth
Too weak to resist temptation
Whose lips kiss in unforgivable betrayal
Don’t speak to me with that mouth
That has embraced another
A mouth full of cheapened kisses
Don’t speak through your weak mouth
Don’t dare to seek to justify
Your unjustifiable infidelities
Don’t speak through that odious mouth
That unspeakable dishonest mouth
Your unclean vessel of elicit Cunnilingus and you fellatio!
Don’t with those unfaithful lips
Whose kisses caressed anothers skin
Speak my name in terms of love
Don’t say sorry with that mouth
Don’t contaminate my ears
With platitudes and insincerity
Speak to me with that insidious mouth
That foul and deceitful mouth
Only to utter a final goodbye
Paul Curtis
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BEASLEY STREET
Dr. John Cooper Clarke
Far from crazy pavements -
The taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
On a dirty afternoon
Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
Are rendered obsolete
The legal term is null and void
In the case of Beasley Street
In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
- a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street
Where the action isn't
That's where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist
In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
In a box on Beasley Street
From the boarding houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze
Wearing dead men's overcoats
You can't see their feet
A riff joint shuts - opens up
Right down on Beasley Street
Cars collide, colours clash
Disaster movie stuff
For a man with a Fu Manchu moustache
Revenge is not enough
There's a dead canary on a swivel seat
There's a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code
Hot beneath the collar
An inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
Impregnates the walls
The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street
The hipster and his hired hat
Drive a borrowed car
Yellow socks and a pink cravat
Nothing La-di-dah
OAP, mother to be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shit-stoppered drains
And crocodile skis
Are seen on Beasley Street
The kingdom of the blind
A one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
The doorbells do not ring
A lightbulb bursts like a blister
The only form of heat
Here a fellow sells his sister
Down the river on Beasley Street
The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
That they're not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can't keep it neat
It's a fully furnished dustbin
Sixteen Beasley Street
Vince the ageing savage
Betrays no kind of life
But the smell of yesterday's cabbage
And the ghost of last year's wife
Through a constant haze
Of deodorant sprays
He says retreat
Alsations dog the dirty days
Down the middle of Beasley Street
People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
Every time they kiss
It's a sociologist's paradise
Each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
Beastly Beasley Street
Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph
On a permanent Monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street
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The Tale Of Custard The Dragon
Ogden Nash
Belinda lived in a little white house,
With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse,
And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon,
And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.
Now the name of the little black kitten was Ink,
And the little gray mouse, she called her Blink,
And the little yellow dog was sharp as Mustard,
But the dragon was a coward, and she called him Custard.
Custard the dragon had big sharp teeth,
And spikes on top of him and scales underneath,
Mouth like a fireplace, chimney for a nose,
And realio, trulio, daggers on his toes.
Belinda was as brave as a barrel full of bears,
And Ink and Blink chased lions down the stairs,
Mustard was as brave as a tiger in a rage,
But Custard cried for a nice safe cage.
Belinda tickled him, she tickled him unmerciful,
Ink, Blink and Mustard, they rudely called him Percival,
They all sat laughing in the little red wagon
At the realio, trulio, cowardly dragon.
Belinda giggled till she shook the house,
And Blink said Week! , which is giggling for a mouse,
Ink and Mustard rudely asked his age,
When Custard cried for a nice safe cage.
Suddenly, suddenly they heard a nasty sound,
And Mustard growled, and they all looked around.
Meowch! cried Ink, and Ooh! cried Belinda,
For there was a pirate, climbing in the winda.
Pistol in his left hand, pistol in his right,
And he held in his teeth a cutlass bright,
His beard was black, one leg was wood;
It was clear that the pirate meant no good.
Belinda paled, and she cried, Help! Help!
But Mustard fled with a terrified yelp,
Ink trickled down to the bottom of the household,
And little mouse Blink strategically mouseholed.
But up jumped Custard, snorting like an engine,
Clashed his tail like irons in a dungeon,
With a clatter and a clank and a jangling squirm
He went at the pirate like a robin at a worm.
The pirate gaped at Belinda's dragon,
And gulped some grog from his pocket flagon,
He fired two bullets but they didn't hit,
And Custard gobbled him, every bit.
Belinda embraced him, Mustard licked him,
No one mourned for his pirate victim
Ink and Blink in glee did gyrate
Around the dragon that ate the pyrate.
But presently up spoke little dog Mustard,
I'd been twice as brave if I hadn't been flustered.
And up spoke Ink and up spoke Blink,
We'd have been three times as brave, we think,
And Custard said, I quite agree
That everybody is braver than me.
Belinda still lives in her little white house,
With her little black kitten and her little gray mouse,
And her little yellow dog and her little red wagon,
And her realio, trulio, little pet dragon.
Belinda is as brave as a barrel full of bears,
And Ink and Blink chase lions down the stairs,
Mustard is as brave as a tiger in a rage,
But Custard keeps crying for a nice safe cage.
-
Dying Flame
Happiness is fleeting,
It comes, it goes.
The light in your eyes,
Once, so brightly shone
Has dimmed to but a glow.
The remnants of an ember,
Nearly burned away to ash,
Of the fire I remember.
Our hearth has grown so cold,
The fire is nearly dead.
Yet, the flames still dance
And rage inside my head.
I still see them, though they've cooled.
I still feel your gentle warmth,
On these cold, winter nights
The fire still burns, deep inside my heart.
Happiness is fleeting,
It comes, it goes.
Yet the ember of our love
Still dimly glows.
It hasn't died, completely,
It just needs a little tending.
The fire can be re-lit.
This doesn't have to be an ending.
Our hearth has grown so cold,
But the warmth may still remain.
Our love can be reborn,
If we allow the flame to win.
Because the flame is still alive,
And though it may be dim,
We just need to stoke the flames
And let our love begin, again.
Daniel Kinnunen. 2018
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The General
By Siegfried Sassoon
“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
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Did you ever wish for wings? To be a bird flying over trees and forest that become sticks and points in the distance? I like this one. It means that somehow it all does not really matter, but you don't get sad about it. It's beautiful, melancholic and empowering... It means that sometimes it is just good to be, no matter what/who or when.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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When I Was Straight
Julie Marie Wade
I did not love women as I do now.
I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned.
I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.
The world was a dreamless slumber party,
sleeping bags like straitjackets spread out on
the living room floor, my face pressed into a
slender pillow.
All night I woke to rain on the strangers’ windows.
No one remembered to leave a light on in the hall.
Someone’s father seemed always to be shaving.
When I stood up, I tried to tiptoe
around the sleeping bodies, their long hair
speckled with confetti, their faces blanched by the
porch-light moon.
I never knew exactly where the bathroom was.
I tried to wake the host girl to ask her, but she was
only one adrift in that sea of bodies. I was ashamed
to say they all looked the same to me, beautiful &
untouchable as stars. It would be years before
I learned to find anyone in the sumptuous,
terrifying dark.
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Lady Lazarus. Read by the author Sylvia Plath herself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkK2fwZfVjA
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(https://i.pinimg.com/236x/06/cf/75/06cf756ab69a068d29329444b313320d.jpg)
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When My Mother Learns I Am A Lesbian
Julie Marie Wade
At first, silence, & then a thud of breath as if
her throat has slid through the chute of her lungs
& landed, heavy -- like a stone -- like a sword
lodged suddenly inside it.
"This explains why you don't wear make-up!" she wails.
A snap -- a pulsing panic pulled back & lightly
camouflaged as fear: "What will I tell my friends?
How can I tell my friends? I can never tell my friends!"
Finally, fatigued & determined: "No one must know."
I give her permission to lie -- privilege she takes
as right. I promise her nothing has changed except
the second chromosome of the body resting next to me.
She asks, not wanting the answer: "I suppose you have
to sleep in the same bed?"
- No, in sleeping bags, Mom, cocooned on separate couches
still wrapped in our swaddling clothes. -
I could have said it, but I didn't.
No tolerance for the Absurd.
My mother's voice, all tissue paper & cellophane,
turns tearful, liquid in its pain: "Where did we go wrong?"
I want to tell her not to forgive me, plead through
the twisted wires that she will not waste her prayers.
"We raised you with God's laws," she says.
"We told you to be pure."
"You raised me to love," I say.
"You told me to be happy."
- But she didn't mean this way, didn't mean this way.
Dear God, she didn't mean this way. -
I watch out the window, sigh.
Already prayers are streaming up the sky.
-
Elizabeth Barrett's custom was to write alone and not show her work to anyone.
During the two years of her courtship with Robert Browning (1845-46) she wrote
a series of sonnets intended for her future husband's eyes alone. One day in
early 1847, married and living in Florence, she appeared behind him, held him
by the shoulder to prevent his turning and at the same time pushed a packet of papers
into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it;
and then she fled to her own room.
Browning said "I dared not reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language
since Shakespeare's." Which is how her Sonnets From the Portuguese came about.
Sonnet 35
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors ... another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more ... as all things prove;
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.
-
The world is made of halves.There are things that hurt and things that heal. There is a person born and and a person dying in this second. Life is short and cruel and beautiful and complicated, but it's worth to be lived ...even if just for the better half...
Good Bones
By Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
-
Nemesis
H. P. Lovecraft
Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
I had drifted o’er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies
That the many-fork’d lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.
I have plung’d like a deer thro’ the arches
Of the hoary primordial grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro’ dead branches above.
I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.
I have scann’d the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.
I have peer’d from the casement in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roof’d village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.
I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.
I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-deck’d throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.
Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.
Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
-
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/09/cf/02/09cf02456565779b865a2886c3c2eb0f.jpg)
-
How to See Deer
Philip Booth
Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,
lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods
inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,
and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.
Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;
make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,
drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen
trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.
You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to
new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;
as if it were dusk
look into light falling:
in deep relief
things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.
-
The Stone Troll
Samwise Gamgee(J. R. R. Tolkien
The Stone Troll is a poem composed by Samwise Gamgee and recorded in the Red Book of Westmarch. Sam recited this poem when Aragorn and the hobbits were resting in the shade of the trolls who had been turned into stone during Bilbo Baggins' adventure with the Dwarves.
Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.
Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: 'Pray, what is yon?
For it looks like the shin o' my nuncle Tim.
As should be a-lyin' in the graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin' in the graveyard.'
'My lad,' said Troll, 'this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o' lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
For he don't need his shinbone.'
Said Tom: 'I don't see why the likes o' thee
Without axin' leave should go makin' free
With the shank or the shin o' my father's kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bone over!'
'For a couple o' pins,' says Troll, and grins,
'I'll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o' fresh meat will go down sweet!
I'll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now! See now!
I'm tired o' gnawing old bones and skins;
I've a mind to dine on thee now.'
But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught.
Before he could mind, Tom slipped behind
And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him! Darn him!
A bump o' the boot on the seat, Tom thought,
Would be the way to larn him.
But harder than stone is the flesh and bone
Of a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain's root,
For the seat of a troll don't feel it.
Peel it! Heal it!
Old Troll laughed, when he heard Tom groan,
And he knew his toes could feel it.
Tom's leg is game, since home he came,
And his bootless foot is lasting lame;
But Troll don't care, and he's still there
With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner! Boner!
Troll's old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!
-
Dragons Dont Die
Dragons may live forever;
At least it’s what legends say;
But, we who love them
Know that they just go away;
To live with other old ones.
In senior colonies,
High on mountain tops, in caves;
Old dragons in their nursing homes;
Will live for many days.
They’ll rejuvenate, aging in reverse.
The only way a dragon dies;
Would be if it were killed.
Even then, it will return;
Its new life to fulfill.
For dragons will return to their
Most loved families.
So if you love a dragon,
And perhaps it seems to die;
Just take heart; it’s out there
Somewhere in mountains, high.
It may be weeks or years or another incarnation
but, soul mates of the dragons
will always be rejoined.
One day you’ll be out walking;
Or perhaps out on your bike;
You’ll feel loving, gentle warmth,
And then you’ll be surprised.
Turn and greet your dragon;
like the phoenix. he won’t die.
M. L. Kiser
(https://www.geckorouge.co.uk/ekmps/shops/geckorouge/images/red-dragon-by-anna-marine-cross-stitch-kit-27247-p.png)
-
I love the small details of life and this is full of them
Rupert Brooke These I Have Loved
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . .
Dear names,
And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,
Whatever passes not, in the great hour,
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust
And sacramented covenant to the dust.
——Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers. . . .
But the best I've known
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, 'All these were lovely'; say, 'He loved.'
-
Wimpy's Poem For The Sea Hag
By E. C. Segar
We slew our foes,
My sweetheart and me
And streams of Corpuscles
Flowed to the sea
All over the walls and on the floor
Were buckets and buckets and buckets of Gore
We stepped on their necks,
On those slippery decks,
As my sweety and me went aft.
And amid all this,
She gave me a kiss,
And amid all this we laughed!
For she was the Hag of the Seven Seas,
And I was her understudy,
And never a tremor ran through her knees,
Though decks were befouled and ruddy.
In the depth of her eyes
Was the Blue of the Skies
As well as the shadows of night.
And I'll sing her love's song
E'en though she's all wrong
For I, too, am not in the right.
-
(https://i.imgur.com/WZm88yM.jpg?1)
-
I love this for it's simplicty, the beauty of it's imagery.
Marianne Moore – “The Steeple-Jack”
Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings —
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body — or flock
mewing where
a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The
whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and
trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;
cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies —
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts — toad-plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
The climate
is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;
but here they’ve cats, not cobras, to
keep down the rats. The diffident
little newt
with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away. The college student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not-native books and hat
and sees boats
at sea progress white and rigid as if in
a groove. Liking an elegance of which
the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church
spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says
Danger. The church portico has four fluted
columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modester by white-wash. Theis would be a fit haven for
waifs, children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven
senators by not thinking about them. The
place has a school-house, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on
the stocks. The hero, the student,
the steeple-jack, each in his way,
is at home.
It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.
-
Juan’s Song
By Louise Bogan
When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes—
Who is it, then, that love deceives?
-
(https://www.woojr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Printable-Arbor-Day-Poem.jpg)
-
WITCH WIFE
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.
She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.
She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
-
The Cross of Snow
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face — the face of one long dead —
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight. (blessed)
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
===============
(Longefellow's wife, Fanny died in 1861 when her
dress caught fire: he too was burned trying to
save her. The poem was found in his portfolio
after his death in 1892)
-
The Ragged Wood
By William Butler Yeats
O, hurry, where by water, among the trees,
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have looked upon their images
Would none had ever loved but you and I!
Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?
O, that none ever loved but you and I!
O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry
O, my share of the world, O, yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I
-
Evening
Sappho
Children astray to their mothers, and goats to the herd,
Sheep to the shepherd, through twilight the wings of the bird,
All things that morning has scattered with fingers of gold,
All things thou bringest, O Evening! at last to the fold.
-
This poem, translated from the Latin written by
an unknown scholar in the 7th century and found
in the commonplace book of a scholar at Reichenau
Pangur Ban
I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis like a task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind
'Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly:
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
So in peace our task we ply
Pangur Ban, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
-
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/b5/67/b9b567fc3f057af2a6ad8da1c613d541.jpg)
-
In 1923, the U.S. got its first book of lesbian poetry : 'On A Grey Thread' by Elsa Gidlow. This is one from a later collection of hers, 'Sapphic Songs'.
For the Goddess Too Well Known
I have robbed the garrulous streets,
Thieved a fair girl from their blight,
I have stolen her for a sacrifice
That I shall make to this night.
I have brought her, laughing,
To my quietly dreaming garden.
For what will be done there
I ask no man pardon.
I brush the rouge from her cheeks,
Clean the black kohl from the rims
Of her eyes; loose her hair;
Uncover the glimmering, shy limbs.
I break wild roses, scatter them over her.
The thorns between us sting like love’s pain.
Her flesh, bitter and salt to my tongue,
I taste with endless kisses and taste again.
At dawn I leave her
Asleep in my wakening garden.
(For what was done there
I ask no man pardon.)
-
Born in the beautiful Eastern Townships of Quebec and raised in Northern Ontario, Line Gauthier fell in love with Ottawa, where she received her B.A. with a Major in French literature. Now finding that oncoming golden years offer a very rich perspective on life and inspiration for poetry, she writes mostly free verse and micro poetry. She has published several photography/poetry books and has other works in progress. A member of Haiku Canada, her haiku has been published in various anthologies.
Local Idiot
V igilante wannabe
I ntentions always good
L ost causes are his nemesis
L oyalty his strength
A bysmally annoying
G auche socially to say the least
E gomaniac~ there’s one in every village
Line Gauthier
-
Dear Doctor, I have Read your Play
BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
Dear Doctor, I have read your play,
Which is a good one in its way,
Purges the eyes, and moves the bowels,
And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears that, in a flux of grief,
Afford hysterical relief
To shatter'd nerves and quicken'd pulses,
Which your catastrophe convulses.
I like your moral and machinery;
Your plot, too, has such scope for scenery!
Your dialogue is apt and smart;
The play's concoction full of art;
Your hero raves, your heroine cries,
All stab, and everybody dies;
In short, your tragedy would be
The very thing to hear and see;
And for a piece of publication,
If I decline on this occasion,
It is not that I am not sensible
To merits in themselves ostensible,
But—and I grieve to speak it—plays
Are drugs—mere drugs, Sir, nowadays.
I had a heavy loss by Manuel —
Too lucky if it prove not annual—
And Sotheby, with his damn'd Orestes
(Which, by the way, the old bore's best is),
Has lain so very long on hand
That I despair of all demand;
I've advertis'd—but see my books,
Or only watch my shopman's looks;
Still Ivan, Ina and such lumber
My back-shop glut, my shelves encumber.
There's Byron too, who once did better,
Has sent me—folded in a letter—
A sort of—it's no more a drama
Than Darnley, Ivan or Kehama:
So alter'd since last year his pen is,
I think he's lost his wits at Venice,
Or drain'd his brains away as stallion
To some dark-eyed and warm Italian;
In short, Sir, what with one and t'other,
I dare not venture on another.
I write in haste; excuse each blunder;
The coaches through the street so thunder!
My room's so full; we've Gifford here
Reading MSS with Hookham Frere,
Pronouncing on the nouns and particles
Of some of our forthcoming articles,
The Quarterly—ah, Sir, if you
Had but the genius to review!
A smart critique upon St. Helena,
Or if you only would but tell in a
Short compass what—but, to resume;
As I was saying, Sir, the room—
The room's so full of wits and bards,
Crabbes, Campbells, Crokers, Freres and Wards,
And others, neither bards nor wits—
My humble tenement admits
All persons in the dress of Gent.,
From Mr. Hammond to Dog Dent.
A party dines with me today,
All clever men who make their way:
Crabbe, Malcolm, Hamilton and Chantrey
Are all partakers of my pantry.
They're at this moment in discussion
On poor De Staël's late dissolution.
Her book, they say, was in advance—
Pray Heaven she tell the truth of France!
'Tis said she certainly was married
To Rocca, and had twice miscarried,
No—not miscarried, I opine—
But brought to bed at forty nine.
Some say she died a Papist; some
Are of opinion that's a hum;
I don't know that—the fellow, Schlegel,
Was very likely to inveigle
A dying person in compunction
To try the extremity of unction.
But peace be with her! for a woman
Her talents surely were uncommon.
Her publisher (and public too)
The hour of her demise may rue,
For never more within his shop he—
Pray—was she not interr'd at Coppet?
Thus run our time and tongues away;
But, to return, Sir, to your play;
Sorry, Sir, but I cannot deal,
Unless 'twere acted by O'Neill.
My hands are full—my head so busy,
I'm almost dead—and always dizzy;
And so, with endless truth and hurry,
Dear Doctor, I am yours,
JOHN MURRAY
-
Sunflower Sutra
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
-
(https://i.imgur.com/9oXHifk.jpg?1)
-
i always fall in love with
lips i can only kiss through glass
if i cannot hold your hand in mine
how can i gauge the size of your fist
the size of your heart
can i love someone
whose breath i never heard at four am
when i pray to the goddess insomnia
as long as i can as many seconds as i steal
fingers to fingers against the glass of sixty miles
and two hundred thousand dead
how do you kiss from six feet under
the new norm of pandemic of plague
please tell me we can share a bed someday
even if its a coffin or a hospital room
tell me the whisper in my ear will be you
and not phones not glass
not glass
poemsforqueerlips @ tumblr
-
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
(https://i.imgur.com/AIzZx2b.jpg?2)
-
Sigebert of Liege (1030 - 1112)
No lily for me, violet or rose,
Lilies for purity, roses for passion denied,
No violets wan, to show with what pure fire
The bride for the bridegroom burns,
I know not how to gild my marigolds,
Proud poppies and narcissus not for me,
Nor flowers written with the names of kings
All that this blockhead zeal of mine could find
Was privet blossom, falling as I touched it,
That never boy or girl would stoop to gather,
And of it, badly woven, ill-contrived,
I twisted these poor crowns,
will you but deign to wear them,
Hide neath the victor's laurel, this poor wreath -
Clumsy the work, a silly weight to carry,
And yet revile it not, for it is love.
(https://i.imgur.com/35YoADi.jpg?1)
(translated from the Latin)
-
The Chimney-Sweeper
William Blake 1757-1827
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry "Weep! weep! weep! weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! —
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and let them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.
And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
-
When You Are Old
W.B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
-
Shelley's Skylark
Thomas Hardy
The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be; -
Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.
Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell -
A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished, when piped farewell,
And where it wastes, are alike unknown.
Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.
Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;
And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.
-
beauty is its own excuse for Being
The Rhodora
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.
(Rhodora is also Azalea part of the genus Rhododendron)
-
We Were Rebels
Steamy flirts
Joyride to nowhere
Hard liquor, AC/DC
And the cyberpunk scene
Your breath, my body
My whisper, your goosebumps
Riding the night like a freight train
Catching itself up past midnight
Ranting drunk, singing mad
Sweat enough to fill each empty flask
Mere moans, or more?
Pulse of primal craving
Enhanced heavy-metal overdrive
Ecstasy’s flavor released
All in one soundbite
Stereo drums pounding us into rhythm
At the peak of omitted innocence
A razor’s edge love affair
Inhaling each other’s nicotine
Intoxicating promises
A one-night forever
We were rebels
Born not to last
Immanuel R. Knight
-
In an Artist's Studio
By Christina Rosetti
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
-
Gay
by The Forgotten Soul
I looked into her eyes
A man by my side
And I fell hard
Unsure if it was wise
Then the man fell off the bridge of the unknown
and into the arms of another
Forgetting all before
I slit my wrists, disappointing my mother
Down a dark path I went
I took anything to numb the pain
Then she appeared
Racing through my mind again
I fell even harder
Something about her smile
Drove me off a cliff
and made me realize for her I would run a mile
She looked at me
my body frozen
Embraced with a hug
And I realized love could not be chosen
Her a girl
and me a girl
I decided what she made me feel
was worth giving a whirl
And now she has my heart
As I have hers
I have never felt ashamed
because love is love and with one another we concur
Nothing is too hard yet nothing is too simple
All it took was a ¨hey¨
For me to realize that deep down all along I was gay
Waiting for the right one
I wasted my time with others
And now I finally feel like all the pain has paid off
And one day our children will have two mothers
So thankyou lord for bringing her to me
because i fear without her, I truly would be nothing
https://allpoetry.com/The_Forgotten_Soul
-
Blue Girls
John Crowe Ransome
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.
Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.
Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.
For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.
-
Emily Dickinson
(of her 1800 poems only 10 were published in her lifetime,
the rest were collected and published in 1890 four years
after her death and had no titles, only numbers)
254
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
1078
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth -
The Sweeping up the Heart,
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity.
-
The Wild Swans At Coole
William Butler Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
-
Boethius (480 - c.524)
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, canonised St Severinus.
His most powerful contribution to the thought of Western Europe,
the De consolatione philosophiae, preserved in Latin, the subtle and precise
terminology of Plato and Aristotle and, after the Bible, was the most widely-read
book of the Middle Ages. King Aelfred translated it in the 9th century,
Chaucer in the 14th, Elizabeth I in the 16th and it can be traced in
English literature from Beowolf to Hamlet and Lycidias. The Bodleian library
preserves a manuscript copy given by Bishop Leofric c.1050
to the cathedral church of Exeter.
Men know the secret caverns of the sea,
Where snow-white pearls are bred,
And where the ruby red,
And on what coast to find
The supple fish or bristling spine.
But where is hid the good their hearts desire,
They know not, groping blind.
That which they seek has climbed afar
Beyond the furthest star,
And lo, they dig a mine.
What shall I pray for minds so dull as these?
This: that they go about
For fame and gold
And having with a mort of pain
Compassed things vain,
They turn from the false thing they hold
And look at last on truth.
=====================================
This bird was happy once in the high trees,
You cage it in your cellar, bring it seed,
Honey to sip, all that its heart can need
Or human love can think of: till it sees,
Leaping too high in its narrow room
The old familiar shadow of the leaves,
And spurns the seed with tiny desparate claws.
Naught but the woods despairing pleads,
The woods, the woods again, it grieves, it grieves.
(text Helen Waddell
translation from the Latin
R. Peiper Leipzig 1871)
-
Nina's Blues
By Cornelius Eady
Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.
What you can't know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching
On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.
You won't be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.
Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.
(https://i.imgur.com/o8R72tk.jpg?1)
-
Willow
By Anna Akhmatova
(Translated by Jennifer Reeser)
...and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.
-
You Begin
by Margaret Atwood
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
-
Room with a View
By Stephen Swinburne
I live in a room by the sea,
where the view is great and the food is free.
Some of the tenants come and go.
Some I eat, if they're too slow.
One end of me is firmly locked.
The other end just gently rocks.
I live in a room by the sea.
It's perfect for an anemone.
-
Darraðarljóð
(Song of Darraðar)
(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)
From the Icelandic Njal's Saga.
A man called Darraðar has a vision:
Twelve Valkyries are weaving the fate of an ongoing battle on a grisly loom...
Blood rains from the cloudy web
On the broad loom of slaughter.
The web of man grey as armour
Is now being woven; the Valkyries
Will cross it with a crimson weft.
The warp is made of human entrails;
Human heads are used as heddle-weights;
The heddle rods are blood-wet spears;
The shafts are iron-bound and arrows are the shuttles.
With swords we will weave this web of battle.
The Valkyries go weaving with drawn swords,
Hildr and Hjörþrimul, Sangríðr and Svipul.
Spears will shatter shields will splinter,
Swords will gnaw like wolves through armour.
Let us now wind the web of war
Which the young king once waged.
Let us advance and wade through the ranks,
Where friends of ours are exchanging blows.
Let us now wind the web of war
And then follow the king to battle
Gunnr and Göndul can see there
The blood-spattered shields that guarded the king.
Let us now wind the web of war
Where the sacred banner is forging forward
Let his life not be taken;
Only the Valkyries can choose the slain.
Lands will be ruled by new peoples
Who once inhabited outlying headlands.
We pronounce a great king destined to die;
Now an earl is felled by spears.
The men of Ireland will suffer a grief
That will never grow old in the minds of men.
The web is now woven and the battlefield reddened;
The news of disaster will spread through lands.
It is horrible now to look around
As a blood-red cloud darkens the sky.
The heavens are stained with the blood of men,
As the Valkyries sing their song.
We sang well victory songs
For the young king; hail to our singing!
Let him who listens to our Valkyrie song
Learn it well and tell it to others.
Let us ride our horses hard on bare backs,
With swords unsheathed away from here!
..."And then they tore the woven cloth from the loom and ripped it to pieces,
each keeping the shred she held in her hands...
The women mounted their horses and rode away, six to the south and six to the north."
(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)(https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4)
With thanks to Michaela Macha and her brilliant website.
-
By Emily Bronte
Long neglect has worn away
Half the sweet enchanting smile;
Time has turned the bloom to gray;
Mold and damp the face defile.
But that lock of silky hair,
Still beneath the picture twined,
Tells what once those features were,
Paints their image on the mind.
Fair the hand that traced that line,
“Dearest, ever deem me true”;
Swiftly flew the fingers fine
When the pen that motto drew.
-
I am an incurable romantic
I believe in hope, dreams and decency
I believe in love,
Tenderness and kindness.
I believe in mankind.
I believe in goodness,
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters.
I am awed by the snow-capped mountains
By the vastness of oceans.
I am moved by a couple
Of any age – holding hands
As they walk through city streets.
A living creature in pain
Makes me shudder with sorrow
A seagull’s cry fills me
With a sense of mystery.
A river or stream
Can move me to tears
A lake nestling in a valley
Can bring me peace.
I wish for all mankind
The sweet simple joy
That we have found together.
I know that it will be.
And we shall celebrate
We shall taste the wine
And the fruit.
Celebrate the sunset and the sunrise
the cold and the warmth
the sounds and the silences
the voices of the children.
Celebrate the dreams and hopes
Which have filled the souls of
All decent men and women.
We shall lift our glasses and toast
With tears of joy.
Leonard Nimoy
-
Hi Kelly ;D
Good to see you found the Forum at last.
It's always good to have fresh, new input.
(Anticipating "The Chronicles", by the way).
Ode To Spot
Lieutenant Commander Data : USS Enterprise
Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses,
contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
a singular development of cat communications,
that obviates your basic hedonistic predilection,
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents.
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance,
and when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display,
connote a fairly well developed cognitive array,
and though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.
-
More Often Than Sometimes - Shane Koyczan
If I knew what I know now then,
way back when we first met,
I'd point to the sunset and say,
“I drew that for you.
Every now and then you can catch it wrinkling in the rain.”
See, I can talk a good game from the stage,
but if you want to gauge the romantic things said when we're messing up the bed,
the best I can give you is,
“Oh my god,
we're totally humping.”
Regardless,
there's something beautiful about stating the obvious.
All of us do it in those moments when we can't believe it we have to say it.
It's like pinching yourself to make sure you're awake.
Take for example something as simple as touching someone;
we so often say, “You're so soft”.
And the person that touched them last may have said it for the twenty-eighth time;
but today,
I'm number twenty-nine.
And I'm not saying it for her benefit; I'm saying it for mine.
Because there's almost seven billion people in the world,
half of which are men, the number of them is 3.5 billion…
Pretty fucking cool that I was number twenty-nine.
And once upon a time I was first in line for a girl with freckles and strawberry blonde hair.
We loved like an electric chair hooked up to a nuclear power plant and plugged into the sun,
and everything we did had never been done.
I woke up with a smile the next morning that told the world
“I'm number one.”
I think of her more often than sometimes.
And if she ever hears this,
I want her to know that our first kiss tasted like pepper.
I met her on June 27th.
That year it was Yellowknife's first day of continual light
and despite the sun not setting that night we each went home alone,
Even though our parents told us, “Be home before dark.”
We could've stayed out for weeks.
Could've watched the way the sun leaks like liquid over the horizon, casting shadows over all the right places of a bargain bin where love was 75% off, and we were collectively 25 cents away from forever.
There are times in the North
when the sun never sets.
And it gets confusing when we ask ourselves questions like,
“Is it too late,
or too early?”
More often than sometimes we didn't care.
We loved like two games of solitaire waiting to be played by one another.
Her mother once asked me, “do you love her?”
And I told her if there were one million teachers breathing down my neck telling me that the answer is no,
I would say yes.
I guess that was enough for her,
because that girl's father palmed me a condom and wished me a happy birthday.
Even now there's no way to tell… was that awkward, or creepy?
We loved like two hit-men hell-bent on assassinating regret.
Her orgasm a wet gremlin multiplying itself into another.
Her younger brother knocked on the door asking, “What are you guys doing in there?”
And somewhere amid the awesome and the amazing we replied in unison,
“Studying.”
And technically we were.
I wrote notes on her skin in flesh toned permanent ink that would sink and set inside as I tried to underline the important parts of her:
Bellybutton,
birthmark,
collarbone.
Wrote notes explaining that hers felt like silk stretched over stone.
I said, “You're so soft.”
She smiled and said, “Duh.”
Followed by, “my bellybutton is not an erogenous zone.”
And I said, “I hate that word,” and she asked, “Which one?” and I said, “Erogenous.”
I told her, “There's beauty in the obvious, and your bellybutton,
that's where you started, it's where cells divided and grew into you
So let me do what students do best, you can test me later but right now let me study.”
She smiled and said,
“You're lucky this is a take-home test, boy.”
I think of the beauty in the obvious,
the way it forces us to admit how it exists.
The way it insists on being pointed out like a bloody nose, or how every time it snows there's always someone around to say,
“It's snowing.”
But the obvious isn't showing off,
it's simply reminding us that time passes,
and somewhere along the way we grow up.
Not perfect,
but up and out.
It teaches us something about time, that we are all ticking and tocking.
Walking the fine line between days and weeks, as if each second speaks of years, and each month has ears listening to forever, but never hearing anything beyond centuries swallowed up by millenniums, as if time was calculating the sums needed to fill the empty belly of eternity.
We so seldom
understand each other.
But if understanding is neither here nor there, and the universe is infinite,
understand that no matter where we go we will always be smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
All we can do is share some piece of ourselves,
and hope that it's remembered.
Hope that we meant something to someone.
My chest is a cannon that I have used to take aim and shoot my heart upon this world.
I love the way an uncurled fist becomes a hand again,
because when I take notes, I need it to underline the important parts of you:
Happy,
sad,
lovely.
Battle cry ballistic like a disaster, a lipstick earth-quaking and taking out the monuments of my hollow yesterdays.
We'll always have the obvious.
It reminds us who and where we are, it lives like a heart shape, like a jar that we hand to others and ask, “Can you open this for me?”
We always get the same answer:
“Not without breaking it.”
More often than sometimes, I say go for it.
-
The Armadillo
By Elizabeth Bishop
for Robert Lowell
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.
Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,
receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.
Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.
The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
-
A Woman Speaks
By Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.
I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.
(https://i.imgur.com/gtZen1T.jpg?1)
Audre Lord 1934-1992
self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,”
-
By The Sea
By Emily Dickinson
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – upon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –
And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –
-
After An Illness, Walking the Dog
By Jane Kenyon
Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
-
The Late Wisconsin Spring
By John Koethe
Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze
Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves
Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass.
The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds
Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes,
People start to circulate again in twos and threes.
The dominant feelings are the blue sky, and the year.
—Memories of other seasons and the billowing wind;
The light gradually altering from difficult to clear
As a page melts and a photograph develops in the backyard.
When some men came to tear down the garage across the way
The light was still clear, but the salt intoxication
Was already dissipating into the atmosphere of constant day
April brings, between the isolation and the flowers.
Now the clouds are lighter, the branches are frosted green,
And suddenly the season that had seemed so tentative before
Becomes immediate, so clear the heart breaks and the vibrant
Air is laced with crystal wires leading back from hell.
Only the distraction, and the exaggerated sense of care
Here at the heart of spring—all year long these feelings
Alternately wither and bloom, while a dense abstraction
Hides them. But now the mental dance of solitude resumes,
And life seems smaller, placed against the background
Of this story with the empty, moral quality of an expansive
Gesture made up out of trees and clouds and air.
The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds,
Permeating the early leaves that flutter in the sunlight
As the air dances up and down the street. Some kids yell.
A white dog rolls over on the grass and barks once. And
Although the incidents vary and the principal figures change,
Once established, the essential tone and character of a season
Stays inwardly the same day after day, like a person’s.
The clouds are frantic. Shadows sweep across the lawn
And up the side of the house. A dappled sky, a mild blue
Watercolor light that floats the tense particulars away
As the distraction starts. Spring here is at first so wary,
And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers,
Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two,
And then subsiding. But the season intensifies by degrees,
Imperceptibly, while the colors deepen out of memory,
The flowers bloom and the thick leaves gleam in the sunlight
Of another city, in a past which has almost faded into heaven.
And even though memory always gives back so much more of
What was there than the mind initially thought it could hold,
Where will the separation and the ache between the isolated
Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden?
Spring here is too subdued: the air is clear with anticipation,
But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation
And living patiently, without atonement or regret,
In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care
—Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into
Light and air and the nothingness of the sky,
Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until,
In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear,
The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact,
And then, into death. But the wind is cool.
The buds are starting to open on the trees.
Somewhere up in the sky an airplane drones.
-
The True Born Englishman is a satirical poem published in 1701 by Daniel Defoe
defending the then King of England William, who was Dutch-born, against xenophobic attacks
by his political enemies, and ridiculing the notion of English racial purity
from The True Born Englishman
By Daniel Defoe
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.
Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.
The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.
The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.
For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.
Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.
’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.
-
On Stella's Birth-day
By Jonathan Swift (c.1727)
Stella this Day is thirty four,
(We won't dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin of the Green,
So little is thy Form declin'd
Made up so largely in thy Mind.
Oh, would it please the Gods to split
Thy Beauty, Size, and Years, and Wit,
No Age could furnish out a Pair
Of Nymphs so gracefull, Wise and fair
With half the Lustre of Your Eyes,
With half thy Wit, thy Years and Size:
And then before it grew too late,
How should I beg of gentle Fate,
(That either Nymph might have her Swain,)
To split my Worship too in twain.
-
Phenomenal Woman
By Maya Angelou
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
-
Bullies don't rule - Simon Hamill
Can you remember when we were at school,
There was always a bully or two.
Hiding behind their so called friends
Just waiting to pick on you.
Things haven't really changed that much,
Bullies still out there being mean.
But they haven't got friends to back them up
They hide behind a computer screen.
How sad their lives must really be,
When it's trolling that gives them their kick.
Cowards and bullies are what they are,
What they do,just makes me feel sick.
When we write,we write for fun,
And we know what we write,
Doesn't suit everyone.
But we won't put up with ridicule and doubt
From some sad bully,
Who doesn't know what their talking about.
-
Interview
By Dorothy Parker
The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They’d rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints ...
So far, I’ve had no complaints.
(https://i.imgur.com/H5TiJvX.jpg?2)
-
“Love Sonnet XI” by Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
-
Almost all of Emily Dickinson's poetry was first
published after her death (1830-1886); her poems
were found in her private papers and very few, if any,
had titles. They are short, concise and mainly consider
love, time, life, nature (birds in particular) and death
Even some erotic poetry.
The first of these could be called Experience, the other two
speak for themselves. She has been likened to
William Blake as being a "sect of one."
I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch, -
This gave me the precarious gait
Some call experience.
===============================
Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it
Proud of the pain I did not feel til thee,
Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it,
Nor to partake thy passion, my humility.
=====================================
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, -
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me !
-
A few fragments of WB Yeats which ring true;
simple statements said in a way that only
poets can. About woman and controlling man,
about fools and how life is so precarious.
"I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue."
from On Woman
May God be praised for woman
That gives up all her mind,
A man may find in no man
A friendship of her kind
That covers all he has brought
As with her flesh and bone,
No quarrels with a thought
Because it is not her own.
To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain
Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine
You say,as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas ?
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors
What they underook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass
-
Passing
By Staceyann Chin
Downtown Brooklyn is easy for me
long sheer skirts do little to hide my open legged stride
see-through button-down sleeveless blouses hug my bodice
so tight my nipples are barely concealed
by the carefully chosen push-up bra from Macy's
see, I'm a femme
a real lipstick lesbian
so I can pass—
smelling like a straight girl in my Victoria's Secret
satin panties pressing against the men who walk alongside me
passing—the way my yellow-skinned grandmother passed
as white women sat in judgment
on plantation stools overlooking fields
of cotton and sugarcane sweetened by gallons
of Black blood and sweat running down thick
between the full breasts of the women
who lay still as blue-eyed men pierced their hearts deep
through the folds joining their legs
it's Jay Street-Borough Hall
and my friend is in trouble
someone takes the time to notice
that the young boy is really a young girl
and the red, white, and blue jacket is not enough
to cover the tattoo on her belly
two naked women wrapped around each other
like pretzels that came out different from the rest
it takes two minutes for them to break two ribs
one for her lover who passes all the time
the other she keeps for herself
and as those bones set
her sorrow breaks wide open
because she knows SHE can never pass
she knows that butch bodies are too strong
too strange, too dark
like those bronze bodies that smell
too thickly of rebellions and revolutions
and we know that revolutions take time
and sacrifice and lives to turn this world around
sometimes it makes me angry
that they think I look like them
so they can convince themselves I am okay
but I hasten to show them the tangled wool between my thighs
and I am quick to remind them
that the funk from me only rises
when my woman touches me
that I can only come
when she calls my name
we need to let them know
we do not wish to pass as semi-white
or almost straight
or nearly normal
so we can hold down corporate jobs
stroking narrow-minded dicks
so we can be invited to family dinners
to disown our brothers and sisters who cannot pass
who will not pass
we must let them know
that after the broken bones have healed
that we will still be here
that long after the bruised hearts have ceased to hurt
we will still be here and long,
long after our mothers no longer weep
we will still be here
still gay
still Black
still survivors in the face of this blatant bigotry
that will one day force us to lace arms and strike back
-
(Philip Larkin 1922-85 .. this is a product of it's time
it can't be universal as I know of many exceptions
but it also rings true for many... I just love it's wry humour)
This Be The Verse
By Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
-
A Russian speaking philosopher wrote of Ivan Turgenev
"by temperament Turgenev was not politically minded.
Nature, personal relationships, quality of feeling -
these are what he understood best, these, and their
expression in art. He loved every manifestation of art
and beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done."
I agree but I am biased having read his poetry and a
few novels.
The Sparrow
Ivan Turgenev
I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my
dog running in front of me.
Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking
game.
I looked along the avenue, and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its
beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was
violently shaking the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move,
helplessly flapping its half-grown wings.
My dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly darting down from a tree
close by, an old dark-throated sparrow fell like a stone right before his
nose, and all ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps, it
flung itself twice towards the open jaws of shining teeth.
It sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling ... but all its tiny
body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with
fear, it offered itself up!
What a huge monster must the dog have seemed to it! And yet it could not
stay on its high branch out of danger.... A force stronger than its will
flung it down.
My Trésor stood still, drew back.... Clearly he too recognised this force.
I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of
reverence.
Yes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny heroic bird, for its
impulse of love.
Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it,
by love, life holds together and advances.
-
Please forgive a second poem by Turgenev.
This person thinks highly of it and so takes
a liberty and posts it.
The Fool
Ivan Turgenev
There lived a fool.
For a long time he lived in peace and contentment; but by degrees rumours
began to reach him that he was regarded on all sides as a vulgar idiot.
The fool was abashed and began to ponder gloomily how he might put an end
to these unpleasant rumours.
A sudden idea, at last, illuminated his dull little brain.... And, without
the slightest delay, he put it into practice.
A friend met him in the street, and fell to praising a well-known
painter....
'Upon my word!' cried the fool,' that painter was out of date long ago ...
you didn't know it? I should never have expected it of you ... you are
quite behind the times.'
The friend was alarmed, and promptly agreed with the fool.
'Such a splendid book I read yesterday!' said another friend to him.
'Upon my word!' cried the fool, 'I wonder you're not ashamed. That book's
good for nothing; every one's seen through it long ago. Didn't you know it?
You're quite behind the times.'
This friend too was alarmed, and he agreed with the fool.
'What a wonderful fellow my friend N. N. is!' said a third friend to the
fool. 'Now there's a really generous creature!'
'Upon my word!' cried the fool. 'N. N., the notorious scoundrel! He
swindled all his relations. Every one knows that. You're quite behind the
times.'
The third friend too was alarmed, and he agreed with the fool and deserted
his friend. And whoever and whatever was praised in the fool's presence, he
had the same retort for everything.
Sometimes he would add reproachfully: 'And do you still believe in
authorities?'
'Spiteful! malignant!' his friends began to say of the fool. 'But what a
brain!'
'And what a tongue!' others would add, 'Oh, yes, he has talent!'
It ended in the editor of a journal proposing to the fool that he should
undertake their reviewing column.
And the fool fell to criticising everything and every one, without in the
least changing his manner, or his exclamations.
Now he, who once declaimed against authorities, is himself an authority,
and the young men venerate him, and fear him.
And what else can they do, poor young men? Though one ought not, as a
general rule, to venerate any one ... but in this case, if one didn't
venerate him, one would find oneself quite behind the times!
Fools have a good time among cowards.
-
Sanity
By Caroline Bird
I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.
I put my ear to a flat shell and—nothing.
I play the lottery ironically. Get married.
Have a smear test. I put my ear to the beak
of a dead bird—nothing. I grow wisdom
teeth. Jog. I pick up a toddler’s telephone,
Hello?—No answer. I change a light bulb
on my own. Organize a large party. Hire
a clown. Attend a four-day stonewalling
course. Have a baby. Stop eating Coco Pops.
I put my ear right up to the slack and gaping
bonnet of a daffodil—. Get divorced. Floss.
Describe a younger person’s music taste as
“just noise.” Enjoy perusing a garden center.
Sit in a pub without drinking. I stand at the
lip of a pouting valley—speak to me!
My echo plagiarizes. I land a real love plus
two real cats. I never meet the talking bird
again. Or the yawning hole. The panther
of purple wisps who prowls inside the air.
I change nappies. Donate my eggs. Learn
a profound lesson about sacrifice. Brunch.
No singing floorboards. No vents leaking
scentless instructions. My mission is over.
The world has zipped up her second mouth.
-
Larkinesque
By Michael Ryan
Reading in the paper a summary
of a five-year psychological study
that shows those perceived as most beautiful
are treated differently,
I think they could have just asked me,
remembering a kind of pudgy kid
and late puberty, the bloody noses
and wisecracks because I wore glasses,
though we all know by now how awful it is
for the busty starlet no one takes seriously,
the loveliest women I’ve lunched with
lamenting the opacity of the body,
they can never trust a man’s interest
even when he seems not just out for sex
(eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass),
and who would want to live like this?
And what does beauty do to a man?—
Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron—
those fiery eyes and steel jawlines
can front a furnace of self-loathing,
all those breathless women rushing to him
while hubby’s at the office or ball game,
primed to be consumed by his beauty
while he stands next to it, watching.
So maybe the looks we’re dealt are best.
It’s only common sense that happiness
depends on some bearable deprivation
or defect, and who knows what conflicts
great beauty could have caused,
what cruelties one might have suffered
from those now friends, what unmanageable
possibilities smiling at every small turn?
So if I get up to draw a tumbler
of ordinary tap water and think what if this were
nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers,
will all I’ve missed knock me senseless?
No. Of course not. It won’t.
-
Two short untitled poems
by Emily Dickinson
A charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld, -
The lady dare not lift her veil
For fear it be dispelled.
But peers beyond her mesh,
And wishes, and denies, -
Lest interview annul a want
That image satisfies.
----------------------------------
Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
-
This humorous verse is from an anthology of
mediaeval lyrics found in Munich in the early
19th century. It had come there with other
flotsam after the dissolution of the monastery
of Bendictbeuern in upper Bavaria and is now
part of the better known collection, Carmina Burana.
The handwriting of this verse is 13th century. Most of the
verses were more serious based on complaints on fortune,
and attacks on simony. But there are also love songs,
drinking songs, songs in praise of the vagabond order,
a profane gamblers' Mass and a few beggings songs.
Most verses were anonymous as is this one, written
by one of the many wandering latin scholars of the
time, who like the Latin tongue knew no frontiers:
"Swift and unstable as the swallows .. hither, thither,
like a leaf caught up by the wind or a spark in the
brushwood, we wander, unweariedly weary."
The Grace of Giving
(Vagans loquitur)
Right and wrong they go about,
Cheek by jowl together.
Lavishness can't keep in step
Avarice his brother.
Virtue, even in the most
Unusual moderation,
Seeking for the middle course,
Vice on either side it, must
Look about her with the most
Cautious contemplation.
You'll remember to have read
In the works of Cato,
Where it is plainly set forth
"Walk but with the worthy".
If then you have set your mind
On the grace of giving,
This of first importance is,
He who now your debtor is,
Can he be regarded as
Worthily receiving ?
Giving otherwise is but
Virtue by repute,
Naught but relatively good,
Not the absolute.
But would you be generous
With security,
Have your glory on account,
Value full with each amount,
Hesitate no more, but give
What you have to me.
(notes are taken from a text by Helen Waddell)
-
Two Poems by Wendy Cope
Bloody Men
Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.
You look at them flashing their indicators,
offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.
If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days,
Flowers
Some men never think of it.
You did. You'd come along
And say you'd nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.
The shop was closed. Or you had doubts -
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
-
Pity the Beautiful
By Dana Gioia
Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes.
Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows.
The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men.
Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck’s gone lousy.
Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.
-
Long Island Sound
By Emma Lazarus
I see it as it looked one afternoon
In August,— by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown.
The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon,
A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon.
The shining waters with pale currents strewn,
The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove,
The semi-circle of its dark, green grove.
The luminous grasses, and the merry sun
In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide,
Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp
Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide,
Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep
Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon.
All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.
-
I've always liked Emerson for the way he described all prayer
as being a disease of the intellect - a little like the lottery although
with that you have a chance of having your prayer answered.
The Past
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed,
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can re-enter there,—
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.
-
Dear Mr Lawrence, you are so witty
(and correct)
The English are so nice
D.H. Lawrence
The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.
And what's more, they're very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you're not nice they soon make you feel it.
Americans and French and Germans and so on
they're all very well
but they're not really nice, you know.
They're not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?
That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn't really matter what you say to them,
they don't really understand
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be.
1932
-
Don't Tell the World that You're Waiting for Me
by Eliza Cook
Three summers have gone since the first time we met, love,
And still 'tis in vain that I ask thee to wed ;
I hear no reply but a gentle " Not yet, love,"
With a smile of your lip, and a shake of your head.
Ah ! how oft have I whispered, how oft have I sued thee,
And breathed my soul's question of " When shall it be ?"
You know, dear, how long and how truly I've wooed thee,
So don't tell the world that you're waiting for me.
I have fashioned a home, where the fairies might dwell, love,
I've planted the myrtle, the rose, and the vine ;
But the cottage to me is a mere hermit's cell, love,
And the bloom will be dull till the flowers are thine.
I've a ring of bright gold, which I gaze on when lonely,
And sigh with Hope's eloquence, " When will it be ?"
There needs but thy " Yes," love--one little word only,
So don't tell the world that you're waiting for me.
-
The Hawthorn Tree
by Willa Cather
Across the shimmering meadows--
Ah, when he came to me!
In the spring-time,
In the night-time,
In the starlight,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
Up from the misty marsh-land--
Ah, when he climbed to me!
To my white bower,
To my sweet rest,
To my warm breast,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
Ask of me what the birds sang,
High in the hawthorn tree;
What the breeze tells,
What the rose smells,
What the stars shine--
Not what he said to me!
(https://i.imgur.com/6mI2Uza.jpg?1)
-
The Next Poem
By Dana Gioia
How much better it seems now
than when it is finally done -
the unforgettable first line,
the cunning way the stanzas run.
The rhymes soft-spoken and suggestive
are barely audible at first,
an appetite not yet acknowledged
like the inkling of a thirst.
While gradually the form appears
as each line is coaxed aloud -
the architecture of a room
seen from the middle of a crowd.
The music that of common speech
but slanted so that each detail
sounds unexpected as a sharp
inserted in a simple scale.
No jumble box of imagery
dumped glumly in the reader's lap
or elegantly packaged junk
the unsuspecting must unwrap.
But words that could direct a friend
precisely to an unknown place,
those few unshakeable details
that no confusion can erase.
And the real subject left unspoken
but unmistakable to those
who don't expect a jungle parrot
in the black and white of prose.
How much better it seems now
than when it is finally written.
How hungrily one waits to feel
the bright lure seized, the old hook bitten.
-
The Best Thing In The World
by Elizabeth Barrett
What's the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
—Something out of it, I think.
-
Tenuous And Precarious
by Stevie Smith
Tenuous and Precarious
Were my guardians,
Precarious and Tenuous,
Two Romans.
My father was Hazardous,
Hazardous
Dear old man,
Three Romans.
There was my brother Spurious,
Spurious Posthumous,
Spurious was Spurious,
Was four Romans.
My husband was Perfidious,
He was Perfidious
Five Romans.
Surreptitious, our son,
Was Surreptitious,
He was six Romans.
Our cat Tedious
Still lives,
Count not Tedious
Yet.
My name is Finis,
Finis, Finis,
I am Finis,
Six, five, four, three, two,
One Roman,
Finis.
-
Bullies don't rule - Simon Hamill
Can you remember when we were at school,
There was always a bully or two.
Hiding behind their so called friends
Just waiting to pick on you.
Things haven't really changed that much,
Bullies still out there being mean.
But they haven't got friends to back them up
They hide behind a computer screen.
How sad their lives must really be,
When it's trolling that gives them their kick.
Cowards and bullies are what they are,
What they do,just makes me feel sick.
When we write,we write for fun,
And we know what we write,
Doesn't suit everyone.
But we won't put up with ridicule and doubt
From some sad bully,
Who doesn't know what their talking about.
-
Freddy
by Stevie Smith
Nobody knows what I feel about Freddy
I cannot make anyone understand
I love him sub specie aet ernitaties
I love him out of hand.
I don't love him so much in the restaurants that's a fact
To get him hobnob with my old pub chums needs too much tact
He don't love them and they don't love him
In the pub lub lights they say Freddy very dim.
But get him alone on the open saltings
Where the sea licks up to the fen
He is his and my own heart's best
World without end ahem.
People who say we ought to get married ought to get smacked:
Why should we do it when we can't afford it and have
ourselves whacked?
Thank you kind friends and relations thank you,
We do very well as we do.
Oh what do I care for the pub lub lights
And the friends I love so well-
There's more in the way I feel about Freddy
Than a friend can tell.
But all the same I don't care much for his meelyoo I mean
I don't anheimate mich in the ha-ha well-off suburban scene
Where men are few and hearts go tumptytum
In the tennis club lub lights poet very dumb.
But there never was a boy like Freddy
For a haystack's ivory tower of bliss
Where speaking sub specie humanitatis
Freddy and me can kiss.
Exhiled from his meelyoo
Exhiled from mine
There's all Tom Tiddler's time pocket
For his love and mine.
-
I've always loved Katherine Mansfield's short stories.
if you only read her Prelude you will know what I mean;
Virginia Woolf confessed in her diary that KM was the only
other writer she was jealous of. I am new to KM's poetry
and was happily surprised ...
Fairy Tale
by Katherine Mansfield
Now this is the story of Olaf
Who ages and ages ago
Lived right on the top of a mountain,
A mountain all covered with snow.
And he was quite pretty and tiny
With beautiful curling fair hair
And small hands like delicate flowers--
Cheeks kissed by the cold mountain air.
He lived in a hut made of pinewood
Just one little room and a door
A table, a chair, and a bedstead
And animal skins on the floor.
Now Olaf was partly fairy
And so never wanted to eat;
He thought dewdrops and raindrops were plenty
And snowflakes and all perfumes sweet.
In the daytime when sweeping and dusting
And cleaning were quite at an end,
He would sit very still on the doorstep
And dream--O, that he had a friend!
Somebody to come when he called them,
Somebody to catch by the hand,
Somebody to sleep with at night time,
Somebody who'd quite understand.
One night in the middle of Winter
He lay wide awake on his bed,
Outside there was fury of tempest
And calling of wolves to be fed--
Thin wolves, grey and silent as shadows;
And Olaf was frightened to death.
He had peeped through a crack in the doorpost,
He had seen the white smoke of their breath.
But suddenly over the storm wind
He heard a small voice pleadingly
Cry, "I am a snow fairy, Olaf,
Unfasten the window for me."
So he did, and there flew through the opening
The daintiest, prettiest sprite
Her face and her dress and her stockings,
Her hands and her curls were all white.
And she said, "O you poor little stranger
Before I am melted, you know,
I have brought you a valuable present,
A little brown fiddle and bow.
So now you can never be lonely,
With a fiddle, you see, for a friend,
But all through the Summer and Winter
Play beautiful songs without end."
And then,--O she melted like water,
But Olaf was happy at last;
The fiddle he tucked in his shoulder,
He held his small bow very fast.
So perhaps on the quietest of evenings
If you listen, you may hear him soon,
The child who is playing the fiddle
Away up in the cold, lonely moon.
-
Sex Goddess
by Maggie Estep
I am THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
so don't mess with me
I've got a big bag full of SEX TOYS
and you can't have any
'cause they're all mine
'cause I'm
the SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
"Hey," you may say to yourself,
"who the hell's she tryin' to kid,
she's no sex goddess,"
But trust me,
I am
if only for the fact that I have
the unabashed gall
to call
myself a SEX GODDESS,
I mean, after all,
it's what so many of us have at some point thought,
we've all had someone
who worshipped our filthy socks
and barked like a dog when we were near
giving us cause
to pause and think: You know, I may not look like much
but deep inside, I am a SEX GODDESS.
Only
we'd never come out and admit it publicly
well, you wouldn't admit it publicly
but I will
because I am
THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
I haven't always been
a SEX GODDESS
I used to be just a mere mortal woman
but I grew tired of sexuality being repressed
then manifest
in late night 900 number ads
where 3 bodacious bimbettes
heave cleavage into the camera's winking lens and sigh:
"Big Girls oooh, Bad Girls oooh, Blonde Girls oooh,
you know what to do, call 1-900-UNMITIGATED BIMBO ooooh."
Yeah
I got fed up with the oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh
I got fed up with it all
so I put on my combat boots
and hit the road with my bag full of SEX TOYS
that were a vital part of my SEX GODDESS image
even though I would never actually use
my SEX TOYS
'cause my being a SEX GODDESS
it isn't a SEXUAL thing
it's a POLITICAL thing
I don't actually have SEX, no
I'm too busy taking care of
important SEX GODDESS BUSINESS,
yeah,
I gotta go on The Charlie Rose Show
and MTV and become a parody
of myself and make
buckets full of money off my own inane brand
of self-righteous POP PSYCHOLOGY
because my pain is different
because I am a SEX GODDESS
and when I talk,
people listen
why ?
Because, you guessed it,
I AM THE SEX GODDESS OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
and you're not.
(https://i.imgur.com/8eGDnHN.jpg?1)
-
(placket - an opening or slit in a garment)
Countrywomen
by Katherine Mansfield
These be two
Countrywomen.
What a size!
Grand big arms
And round red faces;
Big substantial
Sit-down-places;
Great big bosoms firm as cheese
Bursting through their country jackets;
Wide big laps
And sturdy knees;
Hands outspread,
Round and rosy,
Hands to hold
A country posy
Or a baby or a lamb--
And such eyes!
Stupid, shifty, small and sly
Peeping through a slit of sty,
Squinting through their neighbours' plackets.
-
A couple of short and humorous reflections
on relations, sex and everything
General Review Of The Sex Situation
by Dorothy Parker
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
--------------------------------------
Their Sex Life
by A. R. Ammons
One failure on
Top of another
-
Camomile Tea
by Katherine Mansfield
Outside the sky is light with stars;
There's a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.
-
Bleezer's Ice Cream
by Jack Prelutsky
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before,
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
why not do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list:
COCOA MOCHA MACARONI
TAPIOCA SMOKED BALONEY
CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW
CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW
TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO
TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO
LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN
MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN
ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI
YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI
SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH
SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH
BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE
POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL
PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM
PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM
BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER
CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER
AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT
PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT
COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD
CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD
ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP
TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP
GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA
LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA
ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET
WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
taste a flavor from my freezer,
you will surely ask for more.
-
Love Letter
By Nathalie Handal
I’d like to be a shrine, so I can learn from peoples’ prayers the story of hearts. I’d like to be a scarf so I can place it over my hair and understand other worlds. I’d like to be the voice of a soprano singer so I can move through all borders and see them vanish with every spell-binding note. I’d like to be light so I illuminate the dark. I’d like to be water to fill bodies so we can gently float together indefinitely. I’d like to be a lemon, to be zest all the time, or an olive tree to shimmer silver on the earth. Most of all, I’d like to be a poem, to reach your heart and stay.
-
How To Write a Poem
by Laura Hershey
Don't be brilliant.
Don't use words for their own sake, or to show
how clever you are,
how thoroughly you have subjugated them
to your will, the words.
Don't try to write a poem
as good as your favorite poet.
Don't even try to write
a good poem.
Just peel back the folds over your heart
and shine into it
the strongest light that streams
from your eyes, or somewhere else.
Whatever begins bubbling forth from there,
whatever sound or smell or color
swells up, makes your throat
fill with unsaid tears,
whatever threatens to ignite your hair, your eyelashes,
if you get too close—
write that.
Suck it in and quickly
shape it with your tongue
before you grow too afraid of it
and it gets away.
Don't think about
writing a good poem, or a great poem,
or the poem to end all poems.
Write the poem,
you need to hear;
write the poem you need.
-
Beast and Beauty
by Vievee Francis
He took me like a mother, drew my head toward himself,
pulled me onto his lap, wrapped his arms around me and cooed
into my hair, softly as if I was dreaming and
he didn't want to wake me.
He sang a song that sounded like birds singing in the sycamore
then tree frogs. I wanted to leave. I stayed where I was.
He wore a lovely shirt. His hair was surprisingly kempt.
There was half a candle piece and a rug of quarters. Tomato soup
on the stove. I thought, "What a shirt." I prayed my breasts
would magically spill from the zipper. I wanted to feel my calloused heels
on his thighs. I wanted to linger 'til dawn. His pared nails scratched
an itch that had eluded me for years. I cried as if I were slicing onions
in his kitchen. He was a good mother. He held me, like a daughter,
as if I was just as beautiful, as he believed me to be.
-
Pat Parker was a black lesbian feminist poet writing in the ’70s
(https://i.imgur.com/3plQ8mm.jpg?1)
(it is easier to post a screen print than try
and write the lines in the manner intended)
-
"Poetry” by Marianne Moore got whittled down over the years
from twenty-nine lines to four:
"I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a
contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine."
"Moore described the rest of the poem as 'padding,'
and it’s true that the lines are self-contradictory
and hard to explicate, but that, surely, was the point:
they show simultaneously the pointlessness, strangeness,
and necessity of poetry. "
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and
school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
(But the last 5 lines are key)
(Note extract from NYRB)
-
Sexism
by David Lehman
The happiest moment in a woman's life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover's key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.
The happiest moment is a man's life
Is when he climbs out of bed
With a woman, after an hour's sleep,
After making love, and pulls on
His trousers, and walks outside,
And pees in the bushes, and sees
The high August sky full of stars
And gets in his car and drives home.