Favourite poem

I've read this aloud a hundred times and still get a kick out of it. And yes, the erroneous grammar is right.

pity this busy monster,manunkind
by e. e. cummings
--------
pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons* deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.

A world of made
is not a world of born - pity poor flesh
and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if - listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
-1944

 

Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen.

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html

 

A Smugglers Song by Rudyard Kipling. It's been my favourite poem forever.

 

Either:

The City in the Sea - Edgar Allen Poe

Or ...

Spring Morning by D.H. Lawrence

I can't pick.

 

Lord Byron's The Giaour

 

Favorite Poem

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
(Words From Under the Words: Selected Poems)

 

I hope nobody minds if I revive this dead topic, but my absolute favorite poem is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. One of the few poems that still echoes in my head.

 

I am actually going to change my old choice and say Prospice by Robert Browning.

Sorry e.e. cummings, this one just fit me more.