Share your favourite poems [Archive] - The Michelle Kwan Forum

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blueshirt

November 16th, 2000, 01:09 AM

One I discovered recently, by Robert Graves:

  She tells
her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth
stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and
flowers
Despite the snow,

Despite the falling snow.

So, what are your faves?

mano

November 16th, 2000, 08:10 AM

Tyger Tyger
~by William Blake~

 Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of
the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy
fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he
aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And
what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist sinews of thy
heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand?
& what dread feet?

What the hammer? and what the
chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil
? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven
with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he
who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?<!--EZCODE ITALIC END-
->

Always been a favorite 'cause it empowered me. That'
s when I thought I was born in the year of the Tiger. Then I
found out I was a Water Buffalo...Maybe Blake has something about
Watyr Buffaloes.

Maeve

November 16th, 2000, 10:01 AM

The Voiceless ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

WE count the broken
lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild-flowers who
will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them:--
Alas for those that
never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their
hearts' sad story,--
Weep for the voiceless, who have known 
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian
breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But
where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's
churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign 
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death
pours out his longed-for wine
Slow-dropped from Misery's
crushing presses,--
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were
poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!

Maeve

November 16th, 2000, 10:10 AM

Water Buffalo ~ Larry the Cucumber

Everybody's got a
water buffalo,
Yours is fast but mine is slow.
Oh,
where'd we get them? I don't know,
But everybody's got a
water buffalo.

:lol

Maeve

November 16th, 2000, 10:13 AM

Three posts just disappeared... :scratchinghead

eilaram

November 16th, 2000, 10:32 AM

ezboard has had glitches all day...I can see your two missing
posts by looking in your history...I'm wondering how mano's comment
about watyr buffalo got turned into <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/
emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol">

mano

November 16th, 2000, 11:57 AM

I saw your Silly Songs with Larry "Water Buffalo" song
in your profile. Thanks, that's so sweet. BTW, I also read
your fave poem "Voiceless" and I'm wondering if you
used a part of it as your sig before. The poem itself is touching
and true.

LOL,eilaram, I'm wondering how watyr buffalo
turned into a smiley too. Talk about twilight zone.

Hadas

November 16th, 2000, 12:47 PM

My favorite poems are:

The Highwayman which is too long
to post here ;)

and Sick by shel silverstein!

Anita18

November 16th, 2000, 02:05 PM

Hmmmm...I read one recently by e. e. cummings...

"since
feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax
of things
will never wholly kiss you:

wholly to
be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i
swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gestures of my
brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in
my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i
think is no parenthesis."

I love the last line!

Edits: argh! EZboard is being weird on me!

Amelia

November 16th, 2000, 02:12 PM

I love The Highwayman too! By the way, Loreena McKennit put
(I believe) the entire poem to music, and it's on her CD Book
of Secrets, that also has Dante's Prayer on it. It's very very
cool.

Another favourite......

The Road Less
Taken by Robert Frost.


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not
travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked
down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having
perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted
wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them
really about the same.

And both that morning equally
lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the
first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be
telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less
traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.<!-
-EZCODE ITALIC END-->

Amelia

November 16th, 2000, 02:17 PM

Looking at Robert Frost poems just now reminded me of one I've
loved just forever....

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening

 Whose woods are
these I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.  

By the way, what's this about water buffaloes??
?

Cebuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

Hadas

November 16th, 2000, 02:41 PM

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>
I love The Highwayman too! By the way, Loreena McKennit put (
I believe) the entire poem to music, and it's on her CD Book
of Secrets, that also has Dante's Prayer on it. It's very very
cool.<hr></blockquote>

Great
twins think alike :)

Amelia

November 16th, 2000, 02:44 PM

yeah well Hadas I already KNEW you loved the poem and the song.
.. how could I escape the fact when you play it every day??? 

tut tut tut, it's enough to drive a twin insane... <
!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :lol --><img src=http://www.ezboard.
com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol">

Hadas

November 16th, 2000, 02:50 PM

should i sing it now amelia?

Tlut-tlut-tlut-tlut had
they heard it? the horse hooves ringing clear!

Tlut-
tlut tlut-tlut ...etc ;)

Amelia

November 16th, 2000, 02:55 PM

oh no, the singing..........!! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/
laugh.gif ALT=":lol">

Maeve

November 16th, 2000, 03:07 PM

The Voiceless ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
WE count the broken
lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, 
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild-flowers
who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the Magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them:--
Alas for those
that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told
their hearts' sad story,--
Weep for the voiceless, who have
known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where
Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless
sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and
give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till
Death pours out his longed-for wine
Slow-dropped from Misery'
s crushing presses,--
If singing breath or echoing chord 
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies
were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!

Yup mano I've used the "Few can touch the Magic string"
part in a couple of banners - it just gives me chills. I also
have a magnet on the frig and I think it's the sigline in my
e-mails too, though I'm not sure as I don't e-mail myself often.
.. ;)

Amelia, my sister loves Robert Frost with an almost
unhealthy passion. Maybe she's not adopted after all, 'cause
come to think of it she's got A Minor Bird plastered all
over the place.

littlepebbles1

November 16th, 2000, 04:46 PM

"The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll
www.yoga.com/raw/readings.
..enter.html (http://www.yoga.com/raw/
readings/TheWalrusandtheCarpenter.html)

"Sarah
Cynthia Sylvia Stout" by Shel Silverstein
<a href="http://www.ezy.net/~quix/sarah.html"
>www.ezy.net/~quix/sarah.html</a>
(Do not read if you have a weak stomach <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/
emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> )

"Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou
www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~mmay...henom.html (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~mmaynard/
Maya/phenom.html)<
!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END-->

And sorry about any format
glitches.

littlepebbles1

November 16th, 2000, 04:49 PM

That was 3, not a couple, but the stupid EZboard wouldn't let
me edit my post.

&%@#$*.....

Hadas

November 16th, 2000, 05:35 PM

arrrrrgh, EZBoard is *FRUSTERATING* moi!

blueshirt

November 16th, 2000, 05:44 PM

On the opposite end of the spectrum, 
here (http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/bad/index.
html) is a list of bad poetry.
Some of them are so howlingly awful, they're hilarious.

Hadas

November 16th, 2000, 06:22 PM

LOL! I'll have to check more of the bad poems tomorrow!!

smileyllama

November 16th, 2000, 07:40 PM

evilaardvark.bizland. (http://evilaardvark.bizland.)
com/authors/michael/

This is poetry that I
wrote! :-D Don't be scared, it's actually not all that bad
from what I hear....

Anna Christina

November 17th, 2000, 11:49 AM

Anita18--Does thast e.e. cummings poem have a title?

Anna Christina

November 17th, 2000, 12:09 PM

Okay, here’s my contribution. It was introduced to my creative writing class last semester by Michael Dennis Browne, a professor here at the U of M. It was written by children—a class of third-graders, actually. It’s SO adorable and fun! :rollin

The Luscious, Very Kissy, Smoochy Valentine Poem

Kiss me sweetheart,
I’m your brainless mudpie.
Kiss me, baby.
You’re an empty piece of paper
for me to smooch
With muddy lizard fish lips.
I love you true.
Like 0+0=2 zeros,
But even math has problems!
Kiss me sweetheart,
My blue kangaroo.
I love you true
As bats hate light!
Be my earthquake. darling,
Be my molten lava honeybun
And we’ll spin around
Like Earth kissing Mars!
Kiss me, luscious lips.
Pulverize me,
Make me melt
Like ice cream.
Kiss me darling,
My dancing pineapple,
My rubber cement
My broccoli popsicle.
Kiss me, you fool!

3rd grade class poem
Wahpeton Elementary School
Wahpeton, North Dakota

blueshirt

November 17th, 2000, 06:53 PM

I think the title of the poem Anita posted is "since feeling is first", same as the first line.

This is the poem I got my sig from:

 Lullaby
W. H. Auden

 Lay Your Sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstacy,

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Amelia

November 17th, 2000, 08:32 PM

This one is soo beautiful.....

 When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

LXXXIX
by Pablo Neruda

michellesmom

November 18th, 2000, 08:05 AM

You beat me to both of the Robert Frost's.

Here's one of my favorites, by Emily Dickinson:

A ROUTE of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head,—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.

michellesmom

November 21st, 2000, 08:50 AM

...the greatest poet of all time:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

- William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18

mano

November 21st, 2000, 09:15 AM

I love that from Shakespeare. Made me think of this poem.

 How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need; by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Oh to experience that.

michellesmom

November 21st, 2000, 09:57 AM

That's so funny (strange), mano--I almost posted that one, too. They do always remind me of eachother.

blueshirt

November 21st, 2000, 11:12 PM

She's a bit too sappy for my tastes (I know, like I should talk). ;)

I've just realized that a lot of the poems posted so far are either love poems or children's poems...

Here's something by Sandburg:

  Murmurings in a Field Hospital

 [They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days
in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]

COME to me only with playthings now...
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers...
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world...

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet...
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses...
And the world was all playthings.

This one (http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/bad/Marzials.Tragedy.html) is from the Bad Poetry site posted above, but it really deserves an honorable mention by itself. I dare you to keep a straight face while reading this...it's not meant to be a spoof, either.

mano

November 22nd, 2000, 05:39 AM

this poem stuck in my head even after all these years.

 I HEARD a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,—and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

~Emily Dickinson~

smileyllama

November 22nd, 2000, 09:35 AM

As I walk into the fog
I ponder the very essence of life.
Of good times
Of bad times
Of friends and enemies.

As I walk into the fog
I know not where I am headed
Or where I shall end up.
All I know is that
Someday
Somehow
I will be
Somewhere.

That one is by ME! Whatcha think?

littlepebbles1

December 9th, 2000, 06:51 PM

I don't know it anyone heard about this, but she died of cancer this week and she was a really great poet. This is one of my favorite poems from her:

We Real Cool

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Maeve

December 9th, 2000, 08:13 PM

I hadn't heard lp... Wow...
 We Real Cool is by far my favorite Brooks poem, but here's another.

SPEECH TO THE YOUNG :
SPEECH TO THE PROGRESS-TOWARD

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
"even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night."
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.

bwheeler

February 22nd, 2001, 08:23 PM

Smileyllama, I would like to see more of your work, but your link doesn't work anymore.

Do we have any more poets here on the MKforum?

galadrielle

February 22nd, 2001, 11:54 PM

The Moon is Always Female
by Marge Piercy

I was going to post the thing, but I decided to censor myself since it contains words referring to ... anatomy.
I  LOVE this poem.
I highly recommend it. WOMAN POWER!

 Spelling
by Margaret Atwood, 1981

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

 Poem about My Rights
by June Jordan, 1980

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can't
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening /
alone on the streets/ alone not being the point /
the point being that I can't do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach /
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God / or thinking
about children or thinking about the world / all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can't do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the h*ll set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the ba*tard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies *uc* me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they *uc*ed me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was / wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will be the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation of Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the h*ll is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the  Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted on / a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one / a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad / I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarcerationi of
my self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it's about walking out at night
or whether it's about the love that I feel or
whether it's about the sanctity of my vag*na or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
or each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and /
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
 I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who the h*ll set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and night self-determination
may very well cost you your life

notes:
* Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian leader driven from office in 1966 and died in 1972.
* Lumumba was Zaire's first prime minister who was murdered in 1961.
* Bedford-Stuy is short for Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn Black ghetto

Ah, what the hey,
I will go ahead and write out The Moon Is ...
since I've probably already offended with the above poem those who'd take offense.
So, here goes.
I plead poetic license? esp. when they are great poems?

 The Moon Is Always Female
by Marge Piercy, 1980

The moon is always female and so
amd I although often in this vale
of razorblades I have wished I could
put on and take off my s ex like a dress
and why not? Do men wear their s ex
always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher
all tell us they come to their professions
neuter as clams and the truth is
when I work I am pure as an angel
tiger and clear is my eye and hot
my brain and silent all the whining
grunting piglets or the appetites.
For we were priests to the goddesses
to whom were fashioned the first altars
of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal
in the wombdark caves, long before men
put on skirts and masks to scare babies.
For we were healers with herbs and poultices
with our milk and careful fingers
long before they began learning to cut up
the living by making jokes at corpses.
For we were making sounds from our throats
and lips to warn and encourage the helpless
young long before schools were built
to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.

I wake in a strange slack empty
of a motel, shaking like dry leaves
the wind rips loose, and in my head
is bound a girl of twelve whose female
organs all but the numb womb are being
cut from her with a knife. C litoridectomy,
whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter
of the world girl children are so maimed
and I think of her and I cannot stop.
And I think of her and I cannot stop.

If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.
If you are a man, then at age four or else
at twelve you are seized and held down
and your pen** is cut off. You are left
your testicles but they are sewed to your
crotch. When your spouse buys you, you
are torn or cut open so that your precious
semen can be siphoned out, but of course
you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.

For the uses of men we have been butchered
and crippled and shut up and carved open
under the moon that swells and shines
and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant
and then waning toward its little monthly
death. The moon is always female but the sun
is female only in lands where females
are let into the sun to run and climb.

A woman is screaming and I hear her.
A woman is bleeding and I see her
bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts
in a fountain of dark blood of dismal
daily tedious sorrow quite palatable
to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted
that the bread of domesticity be baked
or our flesh, that the hearth be built
of our bones or animals kept for meat and milk,
that we open and lie under and weep.
I want to say over the names of my mothers
like the stone of a path I am climbing
rock by slippery rock into the mists.
Never even at knife point have I wanted
or been willing to be or become a man.
I want only to be myself and free.

I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here
I squat, the whole countery with its steel
mills and its coal mines and its prisons
at my back and the continent tilting
up into mountains and torn by shining lakes
all behind me on this scythe of straw,
a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I
wait for the moon to rise red and heavy
in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful
in the dark I wait and I am all the time
climbing slippery rocks in a mist while
far below the waves crash in the sea caves;
I am descending a stairway under the groaning
sea while the black waters buffet me
like rockweed to and fro.

I have swum the upper waters leaping
in dolphin's skin for joy equally in the nec-
essary air and the tumult of the powerful wave.
I am entering the chambers I have visited.
I have floated through them sleepijng and sleep-
walking and waking, drowning in passion
festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.
I have wandered these chambers in the rock
where the moon freezes the air and all hair
is black or silver. Now I will tell you
what I have learned lying under the moon
naked as women do: now I will tell you
the changes of the high and lower moon.
Out of necessity's hard stones we suck
what water we can and so we have survived,
women born of women. There is knowing
with the teeth and well as knowing with
the tongue and knowing with the fingertips
as well as knowing with words and with all
the fine flickering hungers of the brain.

----
Hey, was the early eighties a fecund poetic period or what?
I predict that the early naughties will be as fecund, for it seems the Muse has again perched on our eagle.

MMBJ

February 23rd, 2001, 07:47 AM

Wow! Those are very powerful poems. As someone with a degree in Literature I can appreciate how image-evoking they are.

On a lighter note: (this is from memory so it may not be perfect)

Nobody loves me,
Nobody cares,
Nobody picks me peaches and pears.
Nobody listens and laughs at my jokes,
Nobody buys me candy and cokes.
Nobody misses me, Nobody cries,
Nobody thinks I'm a wonderful guy.
So if you ask me who my best friend is,
In a whiz I'll stand up and tell you
That Nobody is.
But yesterday night I got quite a scare,
I woke up and Nobody just wasn't there!
I searched in each corner,
Each cranny and nook,
But I found somebody each place I looked!
I've searched til I'm tired and now it's dawn,
There's no doubt about it,
Nobody's gone!

-Shel Silverstein, I believe

SJB

May 7th, 2001, 11:37 AM

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp "Spring and Fall"
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp (to a young child)

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp ----Gerard Manley Hopkins

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Margaret, are you grieving
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Over goldengrove unleaving?
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Leaves, like the things of man,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Ah, child, as the heart grows older
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp It will come to such sights colder,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp By and by, nor spare a sigh,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp And yet you will weep and know why.

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Now, no matter, child, the name,
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Sorrow's springs are the same.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Nor mind had, no nor mouth, expressed
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp What heart heard of, ghost guessed.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp It is the blight man was born for.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp It is Margaret you mourn for.

Icefantx

May 7th, 2001, 08:14 PM

One of my favorites is printed every year in the paper, but I can't recall the name, unless it's Song of the River. They print it in honor of W.R. Hearst. Anyway, since I can't remember that one, here's one of my own. It's called Bob's Poem (Bob's my husband).

The hands of life, whether bad or good, are the ones that see us through.
Each step we take, can make or break, a lifelong dream or two.
The hand, played badly, breaks a heart, the misstep breaks a bone.
The steps we take are all a part of the long, hard journey home.
The hands that shape a child's destiny, so lovingly they tend!
With pats and pinches, hugs like kisses, helping hearts and hurts to mend.
But it's the heart and soul which lives the life, and chooses friend and foe, that stands through happiness and strife, with each bend of the road.
The hands cannot outshine the heart to which they've been attached.
Your love and care for those around you never will be matched.
And as we walk the chosen path to our final resting place, the smile, returned as offered, still lingers on the face.

Robin

bwheeler

July 14th, 2001, 02:02 PM

I've been meaning to post my favorite for quite some time.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

'O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

'O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

'I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

'I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful--a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

'I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

'I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy's song.

'She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said
"I love thee true."

'She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.

'And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream'd--Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.

'I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all,
They cried--"La belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

'I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.

'And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.'

---John Keats

lk36297

July 14th, 2001, 08:23 PM

I've only skimmed through this thread, but some good poems have been posted! Hey, does anyone know about the www.poetry.com scam? If you are interested, you can go to wind.wind.org/literary.scams.htm (http://wind.wind.org/literary.scams.htm)

I hope this is the right link..let me know if it does not work.

I think it's important that anyone interested in writing know about this. I almost got duped myself.

pipster

July 15th, 2001, 09:25 AM

A Child written by me when I started my new job at a elementary school.

As I start the new school year
the sound of many feet I hear.
Brand new clothes and rainbow face
desks are filled, hands in place.

pipster

July 15th, 2001, 09:32 AM

Once again the room I scan, when I start
a sadness descends it grips my heart.
A child I see, eyes of gray
a hard, dark stare he looks away
A child-born innocence unspoken
spark gone, darkness there, spirit is broken.
Filled with pain, origin unknown
anger and resentment are his to own.
A child needs love, I have love to share
I need to make a child care.
Kindness and patience will be my course
all that I am will be my source.
A child such as this will be a trial
but I will go the extra mile.
I will not yell, scream or preach
My plan is easy I will simply teach.

lk36297

July 16th, 2001, 10:27 AM

BUMP

bwheeler

October 13th, 2001, 05:37 PM

A Widow Bird

A widow bird sate mourning for her Love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above
The freezing stream below.

There was no leaf upon the forest bare.
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-stream's sound.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Spiralgraph

October 14th, 2001, 12:19 PM

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

by e.e. cummings

galadrielle

October 15th, 2001, 10:13 AM

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

---  Jalaluddin Rumi (Dari Poet)

The knowing , the perceptive man
is he who knows about himself,
for in self knowledge and insight
lies knowledge of the holiest.

If in his heart there is no fear,
his deeds are not those of the good,
pay no heed to one who's skilled
in quoting the Qur'an by heart.

---  Khushal Khan Khattak (Pashto Poet)

O my idol! A cloud from Paradise
Has bestowed an emerald gown on the earth.
Deserts are like blood-stained silk
And the sky has the fragrance of musk.
With a mixture of musk and red wine
An artist has drawn an image of my love on the desert.
The world has becom peaceful
For both the tiger and the deer.
For such occasions. we need a sun-faced idol,
And a moon. leaning on a cushion of sun.
We must have an idol with cheeks like rubies,
And red wine to match the cheeks.
The world has become a peacock,
With roughness here and smoothness here.
Mud smells of roses,
As though kneaded with rose water.

--  Daqiqi of Balkh (Dari poet)

The last poem wasn't posted in a sarcastic spirit.
Rather, it was posted in memory of the legendary beauty of Afghanistan.
May it find its peace, to boast of its gardens once again.
May it prosper and grow in esteem in the eyes of the world.

galadrielle

October 15th, 2001, 10:19 AM

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
by Wislawa Zymborska

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

 I’LL NEVER RETURN
Meena (1957-87), founding leader of RAWA (http://rawasongs.fancymarketing.net/index.html)
assassinated (February 4,1987 - Quetta, Pakistan)
by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB)
and their fundamentalist accomplices.

I'm the woman who has awoken
I've arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children
I've arisen form the rivulets of my brother's blood
My nation's wrath has empowered me
My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy
Oh compatriot, no longer regard me weak and incapable,
My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women
My fists are clenched with fists of thousands compatriots
To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery.
I'm the woman who has awoken,
I've found my path and will never return.

(Translation of a part of Meena's poem)

galadrielle

October 15th, 2001, 10:30 AM

The Dead of September 11
Toni Morrison - September 13, 2001

Some have God's words; others have songs of comfort
for the bereaved. If I can pluck courage here, I would
like to speak directly to the dead - the September dead.
Those children of ancestors born in every continent
on the planet: Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas ... ;
born of ancestors who wore kilts, obis, saris, geles,
wide straw hats, yarmulkes, goatskin, wooden shoes,
feathers and cloths to cover their hair. But I would not say
a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about
nations, war, leaders, the governed and ungovernable;
all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen
my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil - wanton
or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of
a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple
compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge
my language of hyperbole; of its eagerness to analyze
the levels of wickedness; ranking them; calculating their
higher or lower status among others of its kind.

Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for
a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts.
Because the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be
seduced by blitz.

To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim
false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed
just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear,
knowing all the time that I have nothing to say - no words
stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture
older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you
have become.

And I have nothing to give either - except this gesture,
this thread thrown between your humanity and mine:
 I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot
of its box of flesh to understand, as you have done, the wit
of eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing through
the darkness of its knell.

FKA Catchick

October 18th, 2001, 05:21 AM

Some of my favorites -
Sylvia Plath "Lady Lazarus"
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it_____

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand in foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Back to
I don't know all the words but the last line is so powerful -
"and I eat men like air".

Also Dylan Thomas -
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.

EE Cummings -
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

galadrielle

October 22nd, 2001, 12:37 AM

Wonder
by Natalie Merchant

Doctors have come from distant cities
Just to see me
Stand over my bed
Disbelieving
What they're seeing

They say I must be one of the wonders
Of God's own creation
And as far as they see
They can offer no explanation

Newspapers ask intimate questions
Want confessions
They reach into my head
To steal the glory
Of my story

They say I must be one of the wonders
Of God's own creation
And as far as they see
They can offer no explanation

I believe ...
Fate smiled and Destiny laughed
As she came to my cradle
Know this child will be able
Laughed as my body she lifted
Know this child will be gifted
With Love, with Patience, and with Faith
She'll make her way

People see me
I'm a challenge
To your balance
I'm over your heads
How I confound you
And astound you to know
I must be one of the wonders
Of God's own creation
And as far as you see
You can offer me no explanation

I believe
Fate smiled and Destiny laughed
As she came to my cradle
Know this child will be able
Laughed as she came to my mother
Know this child will not suffer
Laughed as my body she lifted
Know this child will be gifted
With Love, with Patience, and with Faith
She'll make her way

She'll make her way.

galadrielle

October 22nd, 2001, 11:34 AM

UNTITLED POEM

Who can abide whom or what? That's
the problem of my harbor where
the goddess Liberty holds up her green
pistachio ice cream cone to all
comers and children: they have
to go up underneath her skirts
to reach the windows in her diadem
to be her living jewels. They stare out
as strangers at their city and her harbor.
They think - they're all the brains she has! -
"It's been a hard climb up here but we paid
to be allowed to, so we'll look around and leave
our named hearts dated on her vaginal walls,
and leave because it's easier going down."
They don't take her, Emma Lazarus, they don't
take Liberty, although you said she says she gives.

 ON LINES 69-70, BOOK IV,
OF VIRGIL'S AENEAS

AENEAS:  Then I will found a temple of solid marble to Phoebus and Trivia.

You can read the pictures stamped
on the brass door: there
is Aeneas in chin and black boots
doing the Roman salute
as Dido tears at her hair.
The curly waves of the sea
perform close-order drill
while the purple corpse of Pan
disorders the public air
to show that Christ is here.
Long bugles of government
blow to their hearts' content
that honor is murderous.
I even saw Orpheus
sailing in Jason's fleet
and plucking a civic lyre
in praise of colonial fleece.
"That's enough," the priestess said.
"You came here in holy dread
and do not have the time
to laugh at the art any more.
I enlist whatever is mine,
so come in and fill out the forms."

 QUALIFICATION OF SURVIVORS

Hide in cesspools, sleep well
on broken glass, and eat
sh*t. Kiss the whips,
hold the wife for rape,
and have good luck:
stumble behind a lamb
before the bomb bursts
and crawl out of the wreck
to be the epitaph:
"The good ones die first,
but I am not so bad:
Americans are worse."

  FUNERAL ORATION FOR A MOUSE

 This, Lord, was an anxious brother and
 a living diagram of fear: full of health himself,
 he brought diseases like a gift
 to give his hosts. Masked in a cat's moustache
 but sounding like a bird, he was a ghost
 of lesser noises and a kitchen pest
 for whom some ladies stand on chairs. So,
 Lord, accept our felt though minor guilt
 for an ignoble foe and ancient sin:
 the murder of a guest
 who shared our board: just once he ate
 too slowly, dying in our trap
 from necessary hunger and a broken back.

 Humors of love aside, the mousetrap was our own
 opinion of the mouse, but for the mouse
 it was the tree of knowledge with
 its consequential fruit, the true cross
 and the gate of hell. Even to approach
 it makes him like or better than
 its maker: his courage as a spoiler never
 once impressed us, but to go out cautiously at night,
 into the dining room -- what bravery, what
 hunger! Younger by far, in dying he
 was old than us all: his mobile tail and nose
 spasmed in the pinch of our annoyance. Why,
 then, at that snapping sound, did we, victorious,
 begin to laugh without delight?

 Our stomachs, deep in an analysis
 of their own stolen baits
 ( and asking, "Lord, Host, to whom are we the pests?" ),
 contracted and demanded a retreat
 from our machine and its effect of death,
 as if the mouse's fingers, skinnier
 than hairpins and as breakable as cheese,
 could grasp our grasping lives, and in
 their drowning movement pull us under too,
 into the common death beyond the mousetrap.

galadrielle

November 9th, 2001, 04:11 AM

Across The Universe
(Lennon/McCartney)

Words are flowing out like endless rain
Into a paper cup they slither while they pass they slip
Away across the Universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy are drifting
Through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai Guru Deva Om
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.

Images of broken light which dance before me
Like a million eyes they call me
On and on across the Universe
Thoughts meander like a restless wind
Inside a letter box they tumble
Blindly as they make their way across the Universe

Jai Guru Deva Om
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.

Sounds of laughter shades of earth
Are ringing through my open ears
Inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines
Around me like a million suns and calls me
On and on across the Universe

Jai Guru Deva Om
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world.

Translation:
Jai - live forever
Guru - teacher
Deva - heavenly one
Om - the vibration of the universe

---------
Peace to us all.
Peace, and some gosh-darned good skatin' to discuss.

galadrielle

November 23rd, 2001, 02:57 PM

Sonnet 17 from "One Hundred Love Sonnets"
Pablo Neruda
translation by Stephen Mitchell.

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

 aaaaah ... :smokin :smokin

galadrielle

November 23rd, 2001, 03:13 PM

a selection from "Full Powers"
translation by Stephen Mitchell

 The Word (La Palabra)

The word was born
in the blood,
it grew in the dark body, pulsing,
and took flight with the lips and mouth.

Farther away and nearer,
still, still it came
from dead fathers and from wandering races,
from territories that had become stone,
that had tired of their poor tribes,
because when grief set out on the road
the people went and arrived
and united new land and water
to sow their word once again.
And that's why the inheritance is this:
this is the air that connects us
with the buried man and with the dawn
of new beings that haven't yet arisen.

Still the atmosphere trembles
with the first word
produced
with panic and groaning.
It emerged
from the darkness
and even now there is no thunder
that thunders with the iron sound
of that word,
the first
word uttered:
perhaps it was just a whisper, a raindrop,
but its cascade still falls and falls.

Later on, meaning fills the word.
It stayed pregnant and was filled with lives,
everything was births and sounds:
affirmation, clarity, strength,
negation, destruction, death:
the name took on all the powers
and combined existence with essence
in its electric beauty.

Human word, syllable, flank
of long light and hard silver,
hereditary goblet that receives
the communications of the blood:
it is here that silence was formed by
the whole of the human word
and not to speak is to die among beings:
language extends out to the hair,
the mouth speaks without moving the lips:
suddenly the eyes are words.

I take the word and move
through it, as if it were
only a human form,
its lines delight me and I sail
in each resonance of language:
I utter and I am
and across the boundary of words,
without speaking, I approach silence.

I drink to the word, raising
a word or crystalline cup,
in it I drink
the wine of language
or unfathomable water,
material source of all words,
and cup and water and wine
give rise to my song
because the name is origin
and green life: it is blood,
the blood that expresses its substance,
and thus its unrolling is prepared:
words give crystal to the crystal,
blood to the blood,
and give life to life.

kwanfan2002

November 23rd, 2001, 03:39 PM

A selection from Isla Negra a Notebook. Translated by Alastair Reid.

---Night---

I want neither to know nor to dream.
Who can teach me not to be,
to live without going on living?

How does water keep on flowing?
Which is the heaven of stones?
Still, until the great migrations
fix their paths of flight,
and ultimately travel on the winds
of the frozen archipelagoes.

Still, with the secret life
of an undergound city grown tired of its streets,
hidden under the earth,
and no one now knows it exists.
It has neither hands nor markets,
and feeds on its own silence.

At some point to be invisible,
to speak without words, to hear only certain reaindrops falling,
only the flight of a certain shadow.

Sigh, :)

galadrielle

December 5th, 2001, 04:09 PM

If ...
 by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

K8lyn

December 5th, 2001, 05:17 PM

Faith Just In Thee
by Cornelius Vanderbreggen, Jr.

 Not when I see the answer coming, blessed Lord.
That is not faith in Thee, to joy in sight:
But when the very promised good seems farther off
Than ere before, and all is night.

Not when I feel that I can do the thing desired,
That is not faith in Thee, to trust in self:
But when in poverty I stand, stripped bare of all
That once I strusted in as wealth.

Not when the Canaanite is slain and done away,
That is not faith to be without a foe:
But when I conquered am by him, down in the dust,
And deep humiliation know.

To trust Thee then, when all is dark without
And dark within, the fow still in the land.
My poor, weak, helpless, battered, sin-tossed soul
Too stunned to pray, gripped in his hand!

To trust Thee then, to think upon Thy Word.
And then to say, "My Saviour cares for me.
And He will surely help, for He has promised to!"
That, Lord is faith - faith just in Thee!

bwheeler

January 22nd, 2002, 05:21 PM

KUBLA KHAN (1816 version)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tulmult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tulmult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

S. T. Coleridge

bwheeler

June 2nd, 2002, 02:56 PM

that needs more exposure.

Please Call Me by My True Names
By Thich Nhat Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look at me: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, whose wings are still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpiller in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river
I am also the bird, which, when spring comes, arrives
in time to eat the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond
I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence
feeds itself upon the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

I am also the merchant of arms, selling deadly weapons
to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped
by a sea pirate.

I am also the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing
and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in
my hands.

I am also the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my
people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in
my hands.

My pain is like a river of tears - so full it fills up all
the four oceans.

Please call me by my correct names so that I can hear at the
same time all my cries and my laughs, so that I could see
that my joy and pain are but one.

Please call me by my correct names so that I could become
awake, so that the door of my heart be left open,
the door of compassion.

barbnf

June 3rd, 2002, 08:48 AM

"Das Welt" by Goethe ... main theme is: "Das welt is immer spiralformig ..." or translated: the world is always a spiral ... interpretation: achievement of one goal is replaced by another goal ... life goes on endlessly (at least until we die ... and then again ... well, you know ... ;) ...) ...

I have more to say, but I need to go to work ... I also have a favorite lyric -- one my son wrote in the 8th grade and won State First Place for it ... later, I promise to post it ...

barbnf

June 3rd, 2002, 08:05 PM

Titled: "Early Morning" --
An old man sits, motionless, on a park bench
with sun cast shadows on his deep wrinkles
outstretched, gaunt hands feebly grasp a cane
the dilapidated straw hat,
tattered sweater,
and plaid slacks
conceal the crippled shell
that was once vital and full of life
one can almost see his health slowly being
stripped away,
like the peeling paint of the timeworn bench
his very pallid depressed face follows the
movement of a
passing child
overwhelming tiredness envelopes him --
eyes slowly close,
cane drops to the ground --
silence ...
his spirit wings free,
he is young again!

bwheeler

August 20th, 2002, 02:52 AM

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

lottafs

August 20th, 2002, 03:47 AM

This thread should be archived :lol

Okay here's my fave. This might have been heard before, but it's HILARIOUS!!

A peach is a peach;
a plum is a plum.
But a kiss aint a kiss;
without a little tounge.
So open your mouth;
and close your eyes.
and give your tounge;
some exercise!!!

Okay, comedy over, let's get to a sappy one :D This one, I got from "A 6th Bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul":

The Handwriting on the Wall by Valerie Cox

A weary mother returned from the store
Lugging groceries through the kitchen door.
Awaiting her arrival was her 8 yr. old son,
Anxious to relate what his younger brother had done.

"While I was out playing and Dad was on a call
TJ took his crayons and wrote on the wall!
It's on the new paper you just hung in the den.
I told him you'd be mad at having to do it again."

She let out a moan and furrowed her brow.
"Where is your little brother right now?"
She emptied her arms and with a purposeful stride
She marched to his closet where he had gone to hide.

She called his full name as she entered the room.
He trembled with fear—he knew that meant doom!
For the next 10 minutes, she ranted and raved
About the expensive wallpaper and how she had saved.

Lamenting all the work it would take to repair.
She condemned his actions and total lack of care.
The more she scolded, the madder she got
Then stomped from his room, totally distraught!

She headed for theden to confirm her fears
When she saw the wall, her eyes flooded with tears.
The message she read pierced her soul with a dart.
It said "I love Mommy" surrounded by a heart

Well, the wallpaper remained, just as she found it
With an empty picture frame hung to surround it.
A reminder to her, and indeed to all,
Take time to read  the handwriting on the wall!

:D

barbnf

August 20th, 2002, 07:01 PM

I loved the second one! ... that's nice ... :) ...

Ben Searchin

August 20th, 2002, 09:46 PM

the following is one of my favorite comedic poems, written by Paul Gilmartin....titled Undignified Ways to Die

Skin diving with gas tanks you stole from a dentist.
Renting a basement apartment in Venice.

Wearing clown shoes while walking through a mine field at night.
Getting a life-size tatoo of someone your height.

Mistaking a python for your favorite tie.
Hangliding at night on the 4th of July.

Having a bowling ball dropped on your head.
Mooning some cannibals who haven't been fed.

Teasing some Scott's for wearing their kilts.
Approaching a chopper while walking on stilts.

Swimming with sharks in a suit made of meat.
Flashing yourself to a hippo in heat.

Slapping the head of a bald drunken sailor.
Telling your date's burly dad: "Five bucks says I nail her."

www.paulgilmartin.com/poe...poem&pid=9 (http://www.paulgilmartin.com/poems/index.cfm?fuseaction=poem&pid=9) some more of his poems can be found at this site

fdevine

August 21st, 2002, 02:24 AM

The Highwaymen has been my favorite all my life. (62 years). And Kentucky Belle makes me cry.
Here's one I like.

This poem is a goof up. This poem is a dud.
I'l like to write a good one. But doubt I ever could.

or

This poem is a masterpiece; a work of art I'm sure.
You just don't like it cause it's better'n yours.

World's worse:

I had a dog named Queen.The purtiest little collie
that anyone's ever seen, and that's the truth by golly.
She lit into a skunk and that was downright folly.
Lordy, how she stunk, and that's the truth by golly.

OK. It's definetely time for some Michelle news. lol.

anonymous (otherewise known as Grannie Frances)

bwheeler

November 18th, 2002, 02:58 PM

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
Only this, and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; -- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
This it is, and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon I heard again a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind and nothing more!"

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the raven "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as "Nevermore."

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore --
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never -- nevermore."

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent
thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting
--
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted -- nevermore!

motherlode01

November 18th, 2002, 08:12 PM

WHAT FIFTY SAID

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn about the past.

Now I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I go to school to youth to learn about the future.

Robert Frost

motherlode01

November 18th, 2002, 08:22 PM

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

galadrielle

February 11th, 2003, 11:00 PM

America

Let us be lovers.
We'll marry our fortunes together.
I've got some real estate here in my bag.
So we bought a pack of cigarettes
And Mrs. Wagner's pies
And walked off to look for America.

Kathy, I said
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh.
Michigan seems like a dream to me now -
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've come to look for America.

Laughing on the bus,
Playing games with the faces,
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy.
I said, Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera.

"Toss me a cigarette. I think there's one in my raincoat."
"We smoked the last one an hour ago."

So I looked at the scenery.
She read her magazine.
And the moon rose over an open field.

Kathy, I'm lost, I said
Though I knew she was sleeping.
I'm empty and aching
And I don't know why.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
They've all come to look for America.
All come to look for America.
All come to look for America.

- Paul Simon -
"Bookends", 1968

barbnf

February 11th, 2003, 11:13 PM

Wow, gala ... Good Morning! ...

You resurrected an old thread ... almost ready to fall off, probably ...

I found it sooooo interesting to re-read some in this thread ... especially lottafs' above and my response then ... almost prophetic considering the date it was posted! ... ;) ...

P.S. I love "Bookends" ...

galadrielle

February 19th, 2003, 09:23 PM

THE FALL OF ROME
For Cyril Connolly

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literari keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Catos may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

galadrielle

February 20th, 2003, 05:49 AM

Sunday Morning

I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy rush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among waterlights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, no isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V
She says, "but in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source,
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Maeve

February 20th, 2003, 08:18 AM

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals —
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting —
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —
I know why the caged bird sings!

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

trice77

February 21st, 2003, 05:59 AM

Hold Fast To Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow

Langston Hughes

kjesse

February 21st, 2003, 07:07 AM

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

galadrielle

February 23rd, 2003, 01:50 AM

we are running

running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we're running
toward
is what we want.

the birth of language

and adam rose
fearful in the garden
without words
for the grass
his fingers plucked
without a tongue
to name the taste
shimmering in his mouth
did they draw blood
the blades did it become
his early lunge
toward language
dis his astonishment
surround him
did he shudder
did he whisper
eve

sleeping beauty

when she woke up
she was terrible.
under his mouth her mouth
turned red and warm
then almost crimson as the coals
smothered and forgotten
in the grate.
she had been gone so long.
there was so much to unlearn.
she opened her eyes.
he was the first thing she saw
and she blamed him.

poem in praise of menstruation

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon________if

there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta________if there

is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain________if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel________if there is in

the universe such a river________if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave

wishes for sons

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe.________let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
thjen bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

to my last period

well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

questions and answers

what must it be like
to stand so firm, so sure?

in the desert even the saguro
hold on as long as they can

twisting their arms in
protest or celebration.

you are like me,
understanding the surprise

of jesus, his rough feet
planted on the water

the water lapping
his toes and holding them.

you are like me, like him
perhaps, certain only that

the surest failure
is the unattempted walk.

galadrielle

February 23rd, 2003, 02:43 AM

The Visit
for Eileen Cowin

It was not love. No flowers or ripened figs
were in his hands, no words
in his mouth. There was no body
to obstruct us from each other.
The sun was white-hot, a brand
that sank through me and left no mark.
Yet I knew. And Joseph,
poor Joseph with his thick palms,
wearing antlers.
What could he do but wash
the scorched smell from the linen?
What could he do but fit the blades
of wood together into a cradle?

The rain fell and leaves closed
over us like a shield.
A small light formed and the taper
that held it aloft
was dipped many times into my blood.
Now the being rests in the bowl of my hips.
There is no turning. Already
the nails are forged.
The tree thickens.

Poor Clare

April was the thickest month for birth.
We noticed, counting back, the county fair
held nine months ago on low grounds by the river,
a flattened oxbow plain surrounded by elms.
The great smashed tree limbs littered all around
and brushgrown through to cover every sin
beyond the stockbarns there, made breeding pens
where Clare went following the carnie men.

A soft girl, heavy in the hips, with weak
blue lashless eyes and curdled cream for skin,
she altered herself to each occasion.
She wasn't bad, just dull, and much too eager
for a man's touch as she had no father.
At night, her mother nailed the door,
but Clare hid rope and swung down from the eaves
and met men there, so some of us believe

because each night as long as the fair went on
she rode wild on the ferris wheel, the cups,
the roundelet, the bullet, octopus
and dressed in pink, orange feathers won at dice
till there could hardly be a speck of doubt
at how she paid, among the twisted branches
where the wild grass spread too long and in the winter
flattened like hair under tons of snow.

Clare's mother was a hard one, shrewd and big
with iron wadding in the bears she stuffed
and sold in the seamstress shop
she ran from her glassed-in porch.
Poor Clare, she sewed a pup tent, wore it out,
and in the last month everybody talked,
then she deflated slowly so by summer
there was no sign and no sign of the child either.

And never has been, so the town appears
different to me and the secret holds.
Each street's a hiding place with bushes, sewers,
trash dumps, drainpipes, hollow stumps and rocks.
The mother's mute and stuffs her toys in rage.
The cops and social workers fill out reams
of forms in triplicate and single space.
Poor Clare blinks her beaded lashes and defies
each document in silence. Her child is ashes,

carried downriver, laid in a manger, rooted,
dry as grain in a long straight windbreak,
blooming white year after year.
And there's no help to it but I have dreamed
I followed her to the great uprooted wrecks
and there in the massive spirals of dirt-dead roots,
saved the child and buried Clare instead, so now,
when the river comes, flooding the whole park,
the child stumbles toward me on silver feet.

I've risen, I've gone out, I've searched
the yard, the scalding tubs, the massed black thorns.
I've heard its high thin bawl and crept
along the split foundatin of our house,
whining to it like a dog or an anxius ewe,
till I woke and feared my mind was bent.
And nobody, and the cry still faint
as air through a sieve.

Bidwell Ghost

Each night she waits by the road
in a thin white dress
embroidered with fire.

It has been twenty years
since her house surged and burst in the dark trees.
Still nobody goes there.

The heat charred the branches
of the apple trees,
but nothing can kill that wood.

She will climb into your car
but not say where she is going
and you shouldn't ask.

Nor should you try to comb the blackened nest of hair
or press agates of tears
back into her eyes.

First the orchard bowed low and complained
of the unpicked fruit,
then the branches cracked apart and fell.

The windfalls sweetened to wine
beneath the ruined arms and snow.
Each spring now, in the grass, buds form on the tattered wood.

The child, the child, why is she so persistent
in her need? Is it so terrible
to be alone when the cold white blossoms
come to life and burn?

MoonKitty02

February 23rd, 2003, 05:17 AM

Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest we began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick boys - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen 1918

galadrielle

February 23rd, 2003, 05:40 AM

Prayer
by Alan Dugan

God, I need a job because I need money.
Here the world is, enjoyable with whiskey,
women, ultimate weapons, and class!
But if I have no money, then my wife
gets mad at me, I can't drink well,
the armed oppress me, and no boss
pays me money. But when I work,
Oh I get paid!, the police are courteous,
and I can have a drink and breathe air.
I feel classy. I am where the arms are.
The wife is wife in deed. The world
is interesting!, except I have to be
indoors all day and take *hit, and make
weapons to kill outsiders with. I miss
the air and smell that paid work stinks
when done for someone else's profit, so I quit,
enjoy a few flush days in air, drunk, then
I need a job again. I'm caught in a steel cycle.

galadrielle

February 23rd, 2003, 07:00 AM

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

(1921)

galadrielle

February 23rd, 2003, 07:40 AM

Respondez!
by Walt Whitman

RESPONDEZ! Respondez!

(The war is completed - the price is paid - the title is settled beyond recall; )

Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade!

Must we still go on with our affections and sneaking?

Let me bring this to a close - I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles;

Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak;

Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!

Let the old propositions be postponed!

Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!

Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!

Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?)

Let men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!

Let the love that waits in them, wait! let it die, or pass still-born to other spheres!

Let the sympathy that waits in every man, wait! or let it also pass, a dwarf, to other spheres!

Let contradictions prevail! let one thing contradict another! and let one line of my poems contradict another!

Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands! let their tongues be broken! let their eyes be discouraged! let none descend into their hearts with the fresh lusciousness of love!

(Stifled, O days! O lands! in every public and private corruption!

Smother'd in thievery, impotence, shamelessness, mountain-high;

Brazen effrontery, scheming, rolling like ocean's waves around and upon you, O my days! my lands!

For not even those thunderstorms, nor fiercest lightnings of the war, have purified the atmosphere; )

-- Let the theory of America still be management, caste, comparison! (Say! what other theory would you?)

Let them that distrust birth and death still lead the rest! (Say! why shall they not lead you?)

Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! let the days be darker than the nights! let slumber bring less slumber than waking time brings!

Let the world never appear to him or her for whom it was all made!

Let the heart of the young man still exile itself from the heart of the old man! and let the heart of the old man be exiled from that of the young man!

Let the sun and moon go! let scenery take the applause of the audience! let there be apathy under the stars!

Let freedom prove no man's inalienable right! every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!

Let none but infidels be countenanced!

Let the eminence of meannes, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indeceny, importance, lust, be taken for granted above all! let writers, judges, governments, households, religions, philosophies, take such for granted above all!

Let the worst men beget children out of the worst women!

Let the priest still play at immortality!

Let death be inaugurated!

Let nothing remain but the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learn'd and polite persons!

Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!

Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee -- let the mud-fish, the lobster, the mussel, eel, the sting-ray, and the grunting pig-fish -- let these, and the like of these, be put on a perfect equality with man and woman!

Let churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have died of the most filthy of diseases!

Let marriage slip down among fools, and be for none but fools!

Let men among themselves talk and think forever obscenely of women! and let women among themselves talk and think obscenely of men!

Let us all, without missing one, be exposed in public, naked, monthly, at the peril of our lives! let our bodies be freely handled and examined by whoever chooses!

Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth!

Let earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be mention'd the name of God!

Let there be no God!

Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!

Let judges and criminals be transposed! let the prison-keepers be put in prison! let those that were prisoners take the keys! (Say! why might they not just as well be transposed?)

Let the slaves be masters! let the masters become slaves!

Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!

Let the Asiatic, the African, the European, the American, and the Australian, go armed against the murderious stealthiness of each other! let them sleep armed! let none believe in good will!

Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn'd and derided off from the earth!

Let a floating cloud in the sky -- let a wave of the sea -- let growing mint, spinach, onions, tomatoes -- let these be exhibited as shows, at a great price for admission!

Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers! let the few seize on what they choose! let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!

Let shadows be furnish'd with genitals! let substances be deprived of their genitals!

Let there be wealthy and immense cities -- but still through any of them, not a single poet, savior, knower, lover!

Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away!

If one man be found who has faith, let the rest set upon him!

Let them affright faith! let them destroy the power of breeding faith!

Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! seeming! seeming!)

Let the preachers recite creeds! let them still teach only what they have been taught!

Let insanity still have charge of sanity!

Let books take the place of trees, animals, rivers, clouds!

Let the daub'd portraits of heroes supersede heroes!

Let the manhood of man never take steps after itself!

Let it take steps after eunuchs, and after consumptive and genteel persons!

Let the while person again tread the black person under his heel! (Say! which is trodden under heel, after all?)

Let the reflections of the things of the world be studied in mirrors! let the things themselves still continue unstudied!

Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself!

Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself!

(What real happiness have you had one single hour through your whole life?)

Let the limited years of life do nothing for the limitless years of death!

(What do you suppose death will do then?)

galadrielle

March 10th, 2003, 12:23 AM

Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
translated from the Polish by Stanislav Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

An Opinion on the Question of Pornography

There's nothing more debauched than thinking.
This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed
on a plot laid out for daisies.

Nothing's sacred for those who think.
Calling things brazenly by name,
risque analyses, salacious syntheses,
frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,
the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,
discussion in heat -- it's music to their ears.

In broad daylight or under cover of night
they form circles, triangles, or pairs.
The partners' age or sex are unimportant.
Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.
Friend leads friend astray.
Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.
A brother pimps for his little sister.

They prefer the fruits
from the forbidden tree of knowledge
to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines --
all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.
The books they relish have no pictures.
What variety they have lies in certain phrases
marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.

It's shocking, the positions,
the unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.

During these trysts of theirs, the only thing that's steamy is the tea.
People sit on their chairs and move their lips.
Everyone crosses only his own legs
so that one foot is resting on the floor
while the other dangles freely in midair.
Only now and then does somebody get up,
go to the window,
and through a crack in the curtains
take a peep out at the street.

The Century's Decline

Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.

Too many things have happened
that weren't supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.

Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.

Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.

A couple of problems weren't going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.

There was going to be respect
for helpless people's helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.

Stupidity isn't funny.
Wisdom isn't gay.
Hope
isn't that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.

God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.

"How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naive ones.

HATRED

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape --
our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.

One religion or another --
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another --
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy.

Oh these other feelings,
listless weaklings.

Since when does brotherhood
draw crowds?
Has compassion
ever finished first?
Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?
Only hatred has just what it takes.

Gifted, diligent, hard-working.
Need we mention all the songs it has composed?
All the pages it has added to our history books?
All the human carpets it has spread
over countless city squares and football fields?

Let's face it:
it knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins
and a certain bawdy humor to be found
in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.

Hatred is a master of contrast --
between explosions and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif -- the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.

It's always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it's blind. Blind?
It has a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.

We're Extremely Fortunate

We're extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.

One would have
to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.

Get to know other worlds,
if only for comparison.

Rise above the flesh,
which only really knows
how to obstruct
and make trouble.

For the sake of research,
the big picture,
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.

From that perspective,
one might as well bid farewell
to incidents and details.

The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;

dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;

the sign "No Walking On The Grass"
a symptom of lunacy.

PSALM

** gala dedicates this poem to the inmates of North Korea **

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin -- still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren't enough, it won't stop bobbing!

Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant
between the border guard's left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and "Where to?"

Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?

And how can we talk of order overall
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn't been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

bwheeler

May 15th, 2003, 12:52 AM

for the fine poetry.

Does anybody have more to add?

jamieguo

May 15th, 2003, 01:35 PM

Eliot's a favorite, though some of his stuff is so filled with ancient references, like the Waste Land, I don't fully understand it. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is another favorite, along with this one. I love that last stanza.

The Hollow Men
I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all--not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

John King

May 15th, 2003, 01:41 PM

There was a young girl named Oksana

Who'd skate in a balletic manna

For the world to behold

She spun us a gold

Touched many-a-heart of a fana

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There once was a dancer named Maya

Who set all our hearts on faya

With Evgeny in tow

They scored a 6-0

Triumphed in the kiss 'n crya

fskaterchick

May 16th, 2003, 12:37 PM

this is a poem that me and my friend wrote becuase her teacher "abused" her LOL! J/K
here it is
Abuse abuse it seem to be obtuse! Everywhere everywhere i don't know if i can bear! The bird the bird he looks like turd! his shirt his shirt he wheres it so much its absurd! He loves to eat and wiggle his feet! abuse abuse i have been abused. my mouth bleeds it bleeds their must be something it needs! Help! Help! shall i eat kelp? I don't get an a apology cause he's just a refuge! OUch ouch! it happened while i was sitting on the couch! He likes red roses cause red is like blood that was coming from my mouth. This abuse is not only physical it is also verbal. This man should not own a gerbal! My mouth is now obtuse from this harsh abuse!

-the teachers name is mr. bird...lol...i typed it really quick b/c i am at a friends b-day party.....so i didn't have time for grammer and crap.... we were really bored....lol!:lol
:SP

Emerald2000

May 16th, 2003, 01:58 PM

Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever fixed-mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Emerald2000

May 16th, 2003, 02:15 PM

The Passionate Shephard To His Love

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant poises;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if thse pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

Her Response

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
Thse pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

But Time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward Winter reckoning yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy poises,
Soon break, soon wither--soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy-buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,--
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy Love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy Love.

madison

May 16th, 2003, 08:21 PM

STEPPING WESTWARD

"What, you are stepping westward?"--"Yea."
--'Twould be a 'wildish' destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange Land, and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?

The dewy ground was dark and cold;
Behind, all gloomy to behold;
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of 'heavenly' destiny:
I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound
Of something without place or bound;
And seemed to give me spiritual right
To travel through that region bright.

The voice was soft, and she who spake
Was walking by her native lake:
The salutation had to me
The very sound of courtesy:
Its power was felt; and while my eye
Was fixed upon the glowing sky,
The echo of the voice enwrought
A human sweetness with the thought
Of travelling through the world that lay
Before me in my endless way.

~William Wordsworth~

latasha

July 17th, 2003, 03:19 PM

A famous passage from Milton's Paradise Lost:

With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of Heav'n, her starry train:

But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.

madison

July 17th, 2003, 09:22 PM

SONG

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Adrienne Rich

madison

July 17th, 2003, 09:31 PM

The Garden by Moonlight

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snowball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.

Amy Lowell

latasha

September 22nd, 2003, 09:46 AM

Another passage from Milton's Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

eventerbess

September 22nd, 2003, 01:31 PM

Leo Marks was a codemaster for Britain during WWII. He wrote poems for agents behind enemeny lines to memorize and use as the basis for their coded messages. His fiance was killed in a plane crash. He wrote the following poem, and later gave it to a female agent who was caught by the Nazis, tortured and killed.

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

Thanks to everyone for sharing, this is a great thread.

fetalattraction

September 23rd, 2003, 09:04 PM

I wrote my own damn favorite poem, here it is:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Elvis is dead,
Jesus is, too.

latasha

December 21st, 2003, 08:51 AM

Here is one of my favourite poems by William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

GardenKitty

December 22nd, 2003, 09:17 AM

My favorite is Haunted Houses by Longfellow

www.everypoet.com/archive...houses.htm (http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow/longfellow_birds_of_passage_haunted_houses.htm)

This is my favorite line from the poem:

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

lk36297

March 27th, 2004, 02:29 AM

"Still I Rise" Maya Angelou
"Birches" Robert Frost
"Seeing Red" Al Young
"One Art" Elizabeth Bishop

all highly recommended!
:D

mano

March 27th, 2004, 06:43 AM

I have forgotten about this thread. I thought it got lost in cyberspace. I have to go hunt down more poems to add.

bwheeler

May 31st, 2005, 07:21 PM

what has happened to random threads?

madison

May 31st, 2005, 07:29 PM

bwheeler,
It seems MKF has been traumatized by ezboard! What a mess!

bwheeler

May 31st, 2005, 09:16 PM

the one who is traumatized!

I had this thread on hard disk thru page 6, but a number of poems have been lost after mano's post above including some of your posts.

WorldsGreatestMK

June 1st, 2005, 02:07 PM

(by Connie Campbell Bratcher) (sry if religous)

Hallelujah!...We Are Free!!
Free from a heart bound by captivity;
Free from eyes that cannot see;
Free from ears that cannot hear;
Free from a world of darkness and fear;
Free from a life of sin and its toll;
Free from Satan’s power and control;
Free from those heavy chains that bind;
Free in our spirit, soul, and mind...

Hallelujah!...We Are Free!!

Free by God’s wondrous-amazing grace;
Free by His Son who died in our place;
Free by the precious blood that He shed;
Free by the resurrection from the dead;
Free by His pardon from all our sin;
Free by His cleansing power within;
Free by our Creator’s omnipotent hand;
Free as we bow and are born again...

Hallelujah!...We Are Free!!

Free to know peace and true happiness;
Free to enjoy a life that is blessed;
Free to love and forgive our brother;
Free to serve God and one another;
Free to live righteous, holy lives;
Free to follow Christ as He guides;
Free to worship and praise His Name;
Thank God we’re FREE from all our shame...
Hallelujah!...We Are Free!!

By ?????????????

When things go wrong,
As they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile,
But you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit
Rest if you must,
But Don't You Quit!

Life is strange with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a fellow turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out.
Don't give up through the pace seems slow
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor's cup
And he learned too late when the night came down
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit
It's when things seem the worst
That You Mustn't Quit!

madison

June 1st, 2005, 07:51 PM

bwheeler,
I will repost my poems, because they are such favorites I can do it, but when will this ezboard problem be stabilized - if ever? A good poem is a terrible thing to waste.

madison

June 1st, 2005, 08:13 PM

madison

June 1st, 2005, 08:16 PM

"At the New Year" by Kenneth Patchen

In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father
In all that is cold and tiny, those little birds and children
In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers,
Father
In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities
In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father
In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners out on the black water
In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father
In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are
In the name of those who wait, in the sound of angry voices, Father
Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity's window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.

madison

June 1st, 2005, 08:25 PM

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain --and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost

madison

June 1st, 2005, 08:27 PM

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with~ hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

Robert Frost

madison

June 1st, 2005, 09:30 PM

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.

Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I go to school to youth to learn the future.

Robert Frost