Your Favorite Poems

[MCT]

Is it the 'untroubling' one?

Do you even clare?

[Lisa]

here is a simple one but one of my all time favs...

W.H. Auden -(Funeral Blues)Stop All The Clocks.

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

 Let the aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
 Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead
 Put crepe bows round the white necks of public doves
 Let 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 love would last forever; I was wrong

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

[journey]

Sylvia Plath - Insomniac 

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

 

[journey]

Anne Sexton - Courage 

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.
 

[Jim]

Is it the 'untroubling' one?

Do you even clare?

No, I only ask because I think you're wrong, and it ain't no mistake partner. 

[MCT]

Is it the 'untroubling' one?

Do you even clare?

No, I only ask because I think you're wrong, and it ain't no mistake partner.?

Clare. John Clare.

I Am

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

--John Clare--

It's not the untroubling one...

[journey]

Anne Sexton - Cinderella 

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
That story.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
 

[Jim]

Man...

...Say the joke again, and I might get it. 

[Where is Hassan Nasrallah ?]

i think i'm the least poetic guy in the world.
i dont know any poems.
i dont think poems are cool.
i despise poems.

yeah well, at least i will never be an emo kid

[MCT]

Man...

...Say the joke again, and I might get it.?

Nah. I don't really clare for doing things thrice...

i dont think poems are cool.
i despise poems.

Then why don't you stay the fuck out of this thread?

yeah well, at least i will never be an emo kid

What you consider to be an unsavory archetype would be altogether more desirable than your own personal umbrage.

[Where is Hassan Nasrallah ?]

Man...

...Say the joke again, and I might get it.?

Nah. I don't really clare for doing things thrice...

i dont think poems are cool.
i despise poems.

Then why don't you stay the fuck out of this thread?

yeah well, at least i will never be an emo kid

What you consider to be an unsavory archetype would be altogether more desirable than your own personal umbrage.

you find me desirable ?

i wish i liked poems but i don't. i came in this thread to see what was so great about that. that's called curiosity :

[Sakib]

im not really a poetic dude

but highway man is a fun poem

[MCT]

A confessional facial expression (Dictator?s Reflections)

Trying to explain what argument is,
I fall into my own fallacy; can?t see
What they mean as they argue too.
They see me, the adversary, stubborn.
To me their immovable stance is born
From luxury of wanting to take not give,
Yet I strive to provide and be permissive.
Fallen, not taking, contradicting self?s go,
I stumble over the me they see without woe.

--Khalida Qattash--

[journey]

THE MOON

by: Sappho

HE stars about the lovely moon
Fade back and vanish very soon,
When, round and full, her silver face
Swims into sight, and lights all space.

[Tied-Up]

Here is one of my favorite poems:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

~Randall Jarrell

[August 18th]

THE MOON

by: Sappho

HE stars about the lovely moon
Fade back and vanish very soon,
When, round and full, her silver face
Swims into sight, and lights all space.

i liked that one.

[Jessica]

Sir Walter Scott
From Canto Sixth, XXII.
previous

With war and wonder all on flame,
To Roslin's bowers young Harold came,
Where, by sweet glen and greenwood tree,
He learn'd a milder minstrelsy;
Yet something of the Northern spell
Mix'd with the softer numbers well.

XXIII

             Harold

O listen, listen, ladies gay!
No haughty feat of arms I tell; Soft is the note, and sad the lay,
    That mourns the lovely Rosabelle.

?"Moor, moor the barge, ye gallant crew!
And gentle ladye, deign to stay! Rest thee in Castle Ravensheuch,
    Nor tempt the stormy firth to-day.

"The blackening wave is edg'd with white:
To inch and rock the sea-mews fly; The fishers have heard the Water-Sprite,
    Whose screams forebode that wreck is nigh.

"Last night the gifted Seer did view
A wet shroud swathed round ladye gay; Then stay thee, Fair, in Ravensheuch:
    Why cross the gloomy firth today?"

" 'Tis not because Lord Lindesay's heir
To-night at Roslin leads the ball, But that my ladye-mother there
    Sits lonely in her castle-hall.

" 'Tis not because the ring they ride,
And Lindesay at the ring rides well, But that my sire the wine will chide,
    If 'tis not fill'd by Rosabelle."

O'er Roslin all that dreary night
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam; 'Twas broader than the watch-fire's light,
    And redder than the bright moonbeam.

It glar'd on Roslin's castled rock,
It ruddied all the copse wood glen; 'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak
And seen from cavern'd Hawthorn-den.

Seem'd all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffin'd lie, Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
    Sheath'd in his iron panoply.

Seem'd all on fire within, around,
Deep sacristy and altar s pale; Shone every plllar foliage bound,
    And glimmer'd all the dead men's mail.

Blaz'd battlement and pinnet high,
Blaz'd every rose-carved buttress fair? So still they blaze when fate is nigh
    The lordly line of high St. Clair.

There are twenty of Roslin's barons bold
Lie buried within that proud chapelle; Each one the holy vault doth hold?
    But the sea holds lovely Rosabelle!

And each St. Clair was buried there,
With candle, with book, and with knell; But the sea-caves rung, and the wild winds sung
The dirge of lovely Rosabelle.

[Jessica]

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM
by Edgar Allan Poe
1827

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep?while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

THE END

[Tied-Up]

I don't need a friend, I need to mend so far away
So come sit by the fire and play a while, but you can't stay too long
It aches in every bone, I'll die alone, but not for pleasure
I see my heart explode, it's been eroded by the weather here
If you want me hold me back
~Shaun Morgan

[Prometheus]

As Days Flew By
by Peng

 

The very first time I saw you,
Was special how we met.
You took me by complete surprise.
I knew my heart was set.

As days flew by, we talked again,
But you never seemed to care.
I tried my best to help you out,
By a favor here, or a favor there.

Although I made a fast approach,
Our friendship grew and grew.
I realized how deep I cared,
But the feeling I felt was new.

In time I became attached to you.
From a hug, I wouldn't let go.
I soon saw how close we were,
And the feeling was good to know.

For you, I wrote sweet letters and songs.
You were on my mind all day.
The thought of sleeping was nowhere near,
Unless I knew you were okay.

It hit me then, what I was in -
A unique and precious love.
For the person I said was only mine,
Was an angel sent from above.

The minutes without you turned into days,
And the seconds with you flew fast.
I could only wish to see you more,
And make each moment last.

The times I spent with you,
Were what made my heart complete.
I knew one thing for sure,
Without you, my future was obsolete.

And now, we love just the same,
As it doubles day by day.
I stare deep into your precious eyes,
Yet I'm still speechless to what I should say.

With you, I'm in a whole new world.
You bring out the best in me.
It's hard to picture you not there,
When you taught me who to be.

Yes, the road ahead gets hard,
When things may only seem rough.
But because you and I try so much,
We'll stay strong and get by tough.

Though problems may lie ahead someday,
And either of us could be right;
I promise to always be by your side,
And I promise my heart, so hold it tight.

And so, each night, beside my bed,
When there's only bright stars to see;
I pray that we may never give up,
And will always remain you and me.



well this one has sort of hit a chord with me as of late.......