Favorite Poems/Poets

[Contrarius]

Edna St. Vincent Millay - I, Being Born a Woman

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

This poem is very wonderful. :D

"I'm just a poor little ol' woman, and sex with you makes my little heart go pitter pat, now fuck off."

LOL!

[Fragile Bird]

Another one of my all time favorites, also one that may be scorned by poetry snobs, but I don't care. In the "olden days" when TV stations went off the air for a few hours at night, or at least *signed* off the air (some would then sign right back on), one of the stations I listened to regularly would play this poem every night as their sign-off.

The poet, John Gillespie Magee, was an American pilot who was serving with the Royal Canadian airforce during WWII. He was killed while flying, at age 19. If he could produce this beautiful poem at 19, just think of all the wonderful poetry we lost with his death.

"High Flight"

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

<snip for space>

"High Flight" was the title of one of the poetry books we used in high school, and of course, this was the opening poem. When I started reading this thread, I immediately thought of half a dozen poems, starting with J, Alfred Prufrock, and they are almost all here. High Flight being one of them. I always thought the nuns in my high school chose the book because of the last line, but also, many of them were at least children if not older women during WW II.

I will have to add some of my favourites.

The most pleasent surprise of all is finding out who the poetry lovers are. Angalin I knew already was a poetry lover (I'm sure she cringes at what we write, lol), she always closes our rhymes thread with some Haikku. But sciborg2? Ser Scott? and others. I will be reading your posts more carefully from now on, lol. Poets in your hearts.

[Galactus]

Kinda silly in this thread, but I've always love Etrigan's little transformation thing:

Gone! Gone oh form of man!

Free the prince forever damned!

Release the might from fleshy mire!

Boil the blood in heart of fire!

Gone! Gone oh form of man!

Rise the demon Etrigan!

[Sci-2]

From Alan Moore's script for Black Dossier:

For truly is our cavalcade now done,

Our bead-game won,

Our radiant synthesis complete,

It's figures and it's arabesques resolved below this roaring firmament.

This shining soul beyond life's mummied grip,

Far past the maul of fact,

Where thoughts parade.

Our direst yearnings and our fondest fears at sport,

Made safe from time's iniquity.

We are the tales that soothe your infant brow,

The roles you wore for childhood's alley-play.

Did not your youth, when lust each notion seized,

see paper paramour took oft to bed?

When grown to grey responsibility,

It's disenchantments and diurnal toils,

Come each day's disappointed end

Were we not all thy consolation, thy escape?

And more, the very personality

That scrys this epilogue

Was once unformed,

Assembled hastily from borrowed scraps,

From traits admired in others,

From ideals.

Did fictional examples not prevail?

Holme's intellect?

The might of Hercules?

Our virtures, our intoxicating vice -

While fashioning thyself,

Were these not clay?

If we mere insubstantial fancies be,

How more to thee,

Who substance from us stole?

Not thou alone,

But all humanity

Doth in its progress

Fable emulate.

Whence came thy rocket-ships

and submarines if not from nautilus, from cavorite?

Your trustiest companions since the cave,

We apparitions guided mankind's tread,

Our planet, unseen counterpart to thine,

as permanent, as ven'rable, as true.

On dream's foundation matter's mudyard's rest,

To sketching hands,

Each one the other draws:

The fantasies thou've fashioned fashion thee.

Intangible, we are life's secret soul.

It's guiding lantern principle, it's best.

Untarnished by all subterfuge or spies,

Unshackled from mundane authorities.

Life's certainties erode, yet we endure.

Whilst tyrants topple, yet Quixote rides

with companions of thy cradle nights in glorious pasture

Coleridge never glimpsed.

Rejoice!

Imagination's quenchless pyre burns on,

A beacon to eternity, it's triumphs culture's

proudest pinnacles when great wars are ingloriously forgot.

Here is our narrative made Paradise,

Brief tales made glorious continuity.

Here champions and lovers are made safe

From bowlderizer's quill, or fad, or fact.

Here are brave banners of romance unfurled...

TO BLAZE FOREVER IN A BLAZING WORLD!

[cseresz.reborn]

Bob Dylan - It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The hand made blade, the child's balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon

There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn

From the fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born

Is busy dying

Temptation's page flies out the door

You follow, find yourself at war

Watch waterfalls of pity roar

You feel to moan but unlike before

You discover that you'd just be one more

Person crying

So don't fear, if you hear

A foreign sound to your ear

It's Alright Ma, I'm only sighing

As some warn victory some downfall

Private reasons great or small

Can be seen in the eyes of those that call

To make all that should be killed to crawl

While others say don't hate nothing at all

Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Made everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It's easy to see without looking too far

That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates

Teachers teach that knowledge waits

Can lead to hundred dollar plates

Goodness hides behind its gates

But even the President of the United States

Sometimes must have to stand naked

And though the rules of the road have been lodged

It's only people's games that you gotta dodge

And It's Alright Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs that con

You into thinking your the one

That can do what's never been done

That can win what's never been won

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear

You suddenly find yougot nothing to fear

Alone you stand with nobody near

When a trembling distant voice, unclear

Startles your sleeping ears to hear

That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit

Yet you know there is no answer fit

To satisfy ensure you not to quit

To keep it in your mind and not forget

That it is not he or she or them or it

That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules

For the wise men and the fools

I got nothing Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority

That they do not respect in any degree

Who despise their jobs, their destinys

Speak jealously of them that are free

Cultivate their flowers to be

Nothing more than something

They invest in

While some on principles baptized

To strict party platform ties

Social clubs in drag disguise

Outsiders thay can freely criticize

Tell nothing except who to idolize

And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire

Gargles in the rat race choir

Bent out of shape from society's pliers

Cares not to come up any higher

But rather get you down in the hole

That he's in

But I mean no harm, nor put fault

On anyone that lives in a vault

But It's Alright Ma, if I can't please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs

Limited in sex, they dare

To push fake morals, insult and stare

While money doesn't, talk it swears

Obscentity, who really cares

Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see

With a killer's pride, security

It blows the minds most bitterly

For them that think death's honesty

Won't fall upon them naturally

Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed

Graveyards, false gods, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

Kick my legs to crash it off

Say okay, I have had enough

What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen

They's probably put my head in a guillotine

But It's Alright Ma, it's life and life only

Robert Frost - A Soldier

He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,

That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,

But still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.

If we who sight along it round the world,

See nothing worthy to have been its mark,

It is because like men we look too near,

Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,

Our missiles always make too short an arc.

They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect

The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;

They make us cringe for metal-point on stone.

But this we know, the obstacle that checked

And tripped the body, shot the spirit on

Further than target ever showed or shone.

[Sci-2]

Stone whispers

Patience

But we take chisel in hand

Child begs

Not yet

But the sands have run out

Sky cries

Fly

But we hold our ground

Wind sings

Free

But roots bind us down

Lover sighs

Stay

But we must be gone

Life pleads

Live

But death is the dream

We beg

Not yet

But the sands have run out

Stone whispers

Patience…

— Steven Erickson, Chant of the Living

[Sci-2]

prose poetry (edited to add line break):

"In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk in

the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the

river and press their fists to their temples. In the morning you wake

from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every

moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle,

or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants

and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zinc counters of

the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze.

Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn

this: in the summer windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who

laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of

polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the

scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving-maid

who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to

the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a

white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in

love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy

man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a

francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a

painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with

red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where

the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an

invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment,

then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it

draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city

contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."

-italo calvino

[Sci-2]

"this is okay. i can roll with it.

my mind runs out across the universe.

finds its level.

i'm not leaving.

i'm -- arriving.

everywhere at once.

and whatever else it might be its not the end.

it doesn't feel like death.

unless a rock pool dies, when a wave breaks over it.

or warm breath dies as it fades --

and makes its peace with the air."

-M.Carey, 'Eve'

[Cadiva]

Another one of my all time favorites, also one that may be scorned by poetry snobs, but I don't care. In the "olden days" when TV stations went off the air for a few hours at night, or at least *signed* off the air (some would then sign right back on), one of the stations I listened to regularly would play this poem every night as their sign-off.

The poet, John Gillespie Magee, was an American pilot who was serving with the Royal Canadian airforce during WWII. He was killed while flying, at age 19. If he could produce this beautiful poem at 19, just think of all the wonderful poetry we lost with his death.

This is one of my all time favourite poems. My other favourite poets would be Wilfred Owen, Tennyson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke (basically any of the war poets), Philip Larkin, TS Eliot, John Donne, Edmund Spenser's the Faerie Queene, Milton, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Elizabeth Bartlett, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Betjeman, Rimbaud, Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Vernon Scannell (who came to live in my home town not long before he died). I'm a big lover of poetry.

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs -

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Anthem for a Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen, 1917

• From Vernon Scannell's Walking Wounded (1965):
  

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.

In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;

The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane

Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,

Their green and silent attics sprouting now

With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes

And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst...

Then into sight the ambulances came,

Stumbling and churning past the broken farm,

The amputated sign-post and smashed trees,

Slow waggonloads of bandaged cries, square trucks

That rolled on ominous wheels, vehicles

Made mythopoeic by their mortal freight

And crimson crosses on the dirty white...

The mist still hung in snags from dripping thorns;

Absent-minded guns still sighed and thumped.

And then they came, the walking wounded,

Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,

Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair...

Remembering after eighteen years,

In the heart's throat a sour sadness stirs;

Imagination pauses and returns

To see them walking still, but multiplied

In thousands now. And when heroic corpses

Turn slowly in their decorated sleep

And every ambulance has disappeared,

The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,

And when recalled they must bear arms again

[mythsandstuff]

Galway Kinnell's "Blackberry Eating" is pretty great:

I love to go out in late September

among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries

to eat blackberries for breakfast,

the stalks very prickly, a penalty

they earn for knowing the black art

of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries

fall almost unbidden to my tongue,

as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words

like strengths and squinched,

many-lettered, on-syllabled lumps,

which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well

in the silent, startled, icy, black language

of blackberry-eating in late September.

I also particularly love Seamus Heaney's translation of a section from "The Golden Bough" in the Aeneid, but I can't find it now. And anything by Anne Carson.

[Larry.]

I posted a thread several years linking to a spoken word edition of the original Spanish-language poem by Nicaraguan priest/poet Ernesto Cardenal, but here's an English translation of his most famous (and moving) poem, "A Prayer for Marilyn Monroe":

Lord

receive this young woman known around the world as Marilyn Monroe

although that wasn't her real name

(but You know her real name, the name of the orphan raped at the age of 6

and the shopgirl who at 16 had tried to kill herself)

who now comes before You without any makeup

without her Press Agent

without photographers and without autograph hounds,

alone like an astronaut facing night in space.

She dreamed when she was little that she was naked in a church (according to the Time account)

before a prostrated crowd of people, their heads on the floor

and she had to walk on tiptoe so as not to step on their heads.

You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists.

Church, home, cave, all represent the security of the womb

but something else too …

The heads are her fans, that's clear

(the mass of heads in the dark under the beam of light).

But the temple isn't the studios of 20th Century-Fox.

The temple—of marble and gold—is the temple of her body

in which the Son of Man stands whip in hand

driving out the studio bosses of 20th Century-Fox

who made Your house of prayer a den of thieves.

Lord

in this world polluted with sin and radioactivity

You won't blame it all on a shopgirl

who, like any other shopgirl, dreamed of being a star.

Her dream just became a reality (but like Technicolor's reality).

She only acted according to the script we gave her

—the story of our own lives. And it was an absurd script.

Forgive her, Lord, and forgive us

for our 20th Century

for this Colossal Super-Production on which we all have worked.

She hungered for love and we offered her tranquilizers.

For her despair, because we're not saints

psychoanalysis was recommended to her.

Remember, Lord, her growing fear of the camera

and her hatred of makeup—insisting on fresh makeup for each scene—

and how the terror kept building up in her

and making her late to the studios.

Like any other shopgirl

she dreamed of being a star.

And her life was unreal like a dream that a psychiatrist interprets and files.

Her romances were a kiss with closed eyes

and when she opened them

she realized she had been under floodlights

as they killed the floodlights!

and they took down the two walls of the room (it was a movie set)

while the Director left with his scriptbook

because the scene had been shot.

Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio

the reception at the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor all viewed in a poor apartment's tiny living room.

The film ended without the final kiss.

She was found dead in her bed with her hand on the phone.

And the detectives never learned who she was going to call.

She was

like someone who had dialed the number of the only friendly voice

and only heard the voice of a recording that says: WRONG NUMBER.

Or like someone who had been wounded by gangsters

reaching for a disconnected phone.

Lord

whoever it might have been that she was going to call

and didn't call (and maybe it was no one

or Someone whose number isn't in the Los Angeles phonebook) You answer that telephone!

I think I'm going to re-read one of my volumes of Cardenal's poetry now.

[Sci-2]

Gemineye's Poetic Blood Lines:

Sarah Kay's Hands:

[Datepalm]

The only poem in english i've ever really had a strong reaction to is Eliot's Ash Wednesday, a pretty good chuck of which I could recite by heart by the end of my infantry stint. What this says about my infantry stint...

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

By and large poetry isn't really my thing, though theres definitely more of it in Russian and Hebrew that I enjoy than in English, despite English being overwhelmingly the language I consume culture in. :dunno:

[Sci-2]

'Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?' by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides

with perfect courtesy, to let you in!

Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!

Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint

that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?

Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot

in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself

continually?

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed

with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

the mystery, which is death as well as life, and

not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome

with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine

god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the

present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult

than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said

to the wild roses:

deny me not,

but suffer my devotion.

Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,

hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,

caution and prudence?

Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.

A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next

is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,

upon the immutable.

What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,

and I would bow down

to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,

I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.

I float.

I ramble my way home.

[Sci-2]

You, God, who live next door–

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you

with my urgent knocking–

this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.

I know you’re all alone in that room.

If you should be thirsty, there’s no one

to get you a glass of water.

I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!

I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us

is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry

from one of us

break it down? It would crumble

easily,

it would barely make a sound.

From Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

[Blisscraft]

I love poetry. I have since I was a child. Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Keats, Gray, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Auden, Roethke. Too many to mention. I would include if you are not famiar Hart Crane. He's amazing. Love "To Brooklyn Bridge." Check it out.

[Sci-2]

Heh:

The Day the Saucers Came

by Neil Gaiman

That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,

Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,

And the people of Earth stood and

stared as they descended,

Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us

And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow

But you didn’t notice it because

That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,

Was the day that the graves gave up their dead

And the zombies pushed up through soft earth

or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,

Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,

But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was

Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us

A ship built of dead-men’s nails, a serpent, a wolf,

All bigger than the mind could hold,

and the cameraman could

Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out

But you did not see them coming because

On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods

day the floodgates broke

And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites

Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities

And charm and cleverness and true

brave hearts and pots of gold

While giants feefofummed across

the land and killer bees,

But you had no idea of any of this because

That day, the saucer day, the zombie day

The Ragnarok and fairies day,

the day the great winds came

And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day

All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the

Computers turned, the screens telling

us we would obey, the day

Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,

And all the bells of London were sounded, the day

Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,

The fluttering capes and arrival of

the Time Machine day,

You didn’t notice any of this because

you were sitting in your room, not doing anything

not even reading, not really, just

looking at your telephone,

wondering if I was going to call.

Here is T-Shirt by Ben Templesmith

[Contrarius]

Heh:

The Day the Saucers Came

by Neil Gaiman

Ha! Good one!

[lorrd pytyr peristalsis]

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

... And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

I like pretty much anything this guy writes, but this is my favorite poem.

[Sci-2]

Berry is awesome! I also like “My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves”:

Deep in the back ways of my mind I see them

going in the long days

over the same fields that I have gone

long days over.

I see the sun passing and burning high

over that land from their day

until mine, their shadows

having risen and consumed them.

I see them obeying and watching

the bearded tall man whose voice

and blood are mine, whose countenance

in stone at his grave my own resembles,

whose blindness is my brand.

I see them kneel and pray to the white God

who buys their souls with Heaven.

I see them approach, quiet

in the merchandise of their flesh,

to put down their burdens

of firewood and hemp and tobacco

into the minds of my kinsmen.

I see them moving in the rooms of my history,

the day of my birth entering

the horizon emptied of their days,

their purchased lives taken back

into the dust of birthright.

I see them borne, shadow within shadow,

shroud within shroud, through all nights

from their lives to mine, long beyond

reparation or given liberty

or any straightness.

I see them go in the bonds of my blood

through all the time of their bodies.

I have seen that freedom cannot be taken

from one man and given to another,

and cannot be taken and kept.

I know that freedom can only be given,

and is the gift to the giver

from the one who receives.

I am owned by the blood of all of them

who ever were owned by my blood.

We cannot be free of each other.