There's a poem called Rowing by Anne Sexton. She lived a sad life much like Sylvia Plath. The first half of the poem reads pretty clunky to me, but I love the second half: I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyebal, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat insdie me, the gnawing pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands and embrace it. As the African says: This is my tale which I have told, if it be sweet, if it be not sweet, take somewhere else and let some return to me. This story ends with me still rowing.
Despair By: H. P. Lovecraft O'er the midnight moorlands crying, Thro' the cypress forests sighing, In the night-wind madly flying, Hellish forms with streaming hair; In the barren branches creaking, By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking, Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking, Damn'd demons of despair. Once, I think I half remember, Ere the grey skies of November Quench'd my youth's aspiring ember, Liv'd there such a thing as bliss; Skies that now are dark were beaming, Bold and azure, splendid seeming Till I learn'd it all was dreaming -- Deadly drowsiness of Dis. But the stream of Time, swift flowing, Brings the torment of half-knowing -- Dimly rushing, blindly going Past the never-trodden lea; And the voyager, repining, Sees the wicked death-fires shining, Hears the wicked petrel's whining As he helpless drifts to sea. Evil wings in ether beating; Vultures at the spirit eating; Things unseen forever fleeting Black against the leering sky. Ghastly shades of bygone gladness, Clawing fiends of future sadness, Mingle in a cloud of madness Ever on the soul to lie. Thus the living, lone and sobbing, In the throes of anguish throbbing, With the loathsome Furies robbing Night and noon of peace and rest. But beyond the groans and grating Of abhorrent Life, is waiting Sweet Oblivion, culminating All the years of fruitless quest. Other favorites include: "The Raven" By Poe and a poem I wrote myself. Does liking your own poem make you sound like an arrogant D.Bag? lol!
Without doubt, Milton's Paradise Lost, the best single poen in English which wasn't written as dramatic verse. For shorter pieces, I love nearly anything by Gerald Manley Hopkins.
I heard this today on public radio. It's so cynical, I love it! What She Was Wearing by Denver Butson this is my suicide dress she told him I only wear it on days when I'm afraid I might kill myself if I don't wear it you've been wearing it every day since we met he said and these are my arson gloves so you don't set fire to something? he asked exactly and this is my terrorism lipstick my assault and battery eyeliner my armed robbery boots I'd like to undress you he said but would that make me an accomplice? and today she said I'm wearing my infidelity underwear so don't get any ideas and she put on her nervous breakdown hat and walked out the door
Oh gosh, The Raven and Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. My favorite poet of all time and one of my favorite authors. I read The Raven for my Forensics competition, and I had to read it 3 times, and that's a LONG poem, so my throat was really sore, but it was worth it!
I do not read a whole lot of poetry. But this poem was at the begining of Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore in the Icewind Dale Trilogy Collector's Edition. We've dug our holes and hallowed caves Put Goblin foes in shallow graves this day our work is just begun In the mines where silver rivers run beneath the stone the metal gleams tourches shine on silver streams beyond the eys of the spying sun in the mines where silver rivers run The hamemrs chime on Mithral pure As dwarven mins in days of yore A craftsman's work is never done In the mines where silver rivers run To dwarven Gods we sing our priase put another orc in a shallow grave we know our work has just begun in the land where silver rivers run
Listen to the MUSTN'Ts, child, Listen to the DON'Ts Listen to the SHOULDN'Ts The IMPOSSIBLEs, the WON'Ts Listen to the NEVER HAVEs Then listen close to me-- Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be.
I like Fire and Ice by Robert Frost. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
Neruda's "Tonight I can write the Saddest Lines"(Poem XX of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). http://www.boppin.com/poets/neruda.html The original in Spanish and WS Merlin's translation. What I like about Neruda's poetry is that they sound beautiful even to non-Spanish speakers.
Face to Face - by Táhirih (a Baha'i poet/theologian/martyr) ~*~*~*~*~ [FONT="][/FONT]If ever I should behold you face-to-face, eye-to-eye, I should be bold to recount my heart's plaint point by point, verse by verse. Like Saba the east wind I have searched everywhere for your countenance from house to house, door to door, alley to alley, from quarter to quarter. Bereft of your visage, my two eyes have wept such bloody tears, Tigris after Tigris, stream upon stream, spring after spring, brook upon brook. In my desperate heart, your love is knitted to the fabric of my being, string by string, thread by thread, warp by warp, and woof by woof. Táhirih has searched every layer of her heart but found only you there, sheet by sheet, fold by fold, cover by cover, over and over again.
Not sure if this has been posted yet, but it's called 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 all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breath 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!" This had a profound effect (affect? not sure) on my life and helped me get out of some tough times.
Thought I'd resurrect this thread. A poem I read today that really spoke to me: Meditation on the Word Need by Linda Rodriguez The problem with words of emotion is how easily meaning drains from their fiddle-sweet sounds and they become empty instruments. I can say love and mean desire to give— open-handed, open-hearted— or I am drawn to the light shining from your soul— or my life is empty without you— or I want to run my hands and mouth down the length of you— or all of these at once. Need, now, is a plain word. I need a nail to hang this picture. I need money to pay my bills. I need air and light, water and food, shelter from storm and sun and cold. To be healthy, to be sane, to survive, I need you.
Came across this one the other day, took me a while to unravel it, but once I did I thought it was prbably one of the better poems I've read recently. Blood by Naomi Shihab Nye “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared. In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion. Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—“shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say. Today the headlines clot in my blood. A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root is too big for us. What flag can we wave? I wave the flag of stone and seed, table mat stitched in blue. I call my father, we talk around the news. It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: Who calls anyone civilized? Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now? (It might help to know that the poet is of mixedheritage, with a Palestinian father and an American mother)
This is my absolute favorite poem... Vincent by Tim Burton Vincent Malloy is seven years old He’s always polite and does what he’s told For a boy his age, he’s considerate and nice But he wants to be just like Vincent Price He doesn’t mind living with his sister, dog and cats Though he’d rather share a home with spiders and bats There he could reflect on the horrors he’s invented And wander dark hallways, alone and tormented Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum He likes to experiment on his dog Abercrombie In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie So he and his horrible zombie dog Could go searching for victims in the London fog His thoughts, though, aren’t only of ghoulish crimes He likes to paint and read to pass some of the times While other kids read books like Go, Jane, Go! Vincent’s favourite author is Edgar Allen Poe One night, while reading a gruesome tale He read a passage that made him turn pale Such horrible news he could not survive For his beautiful wife had been buried alive! He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead Unaware that her grave was his mother’s flower bed His mother sent Vincent off to his room He knew he’d been banished to the tower of doom Where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life Alone with the portrait of his beautiful wife While alone and insane encased in his tomb Vincent’s mother burst suddenly into the room She said: “If you want to, you can go out and play It’s sunny outside, and a beautiful day” Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn’t speak The years of isolation had made him quite weak So he took out some paper and scrawled with a pen: “I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it again” His mother said: “You’re not possessed, and you’re not almost dead These games that you play are all in your head You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy You’re seven years old and you are my son I want you to get outside and have some real fun. ”Her anger now spent, she walked out through the hall And while Vincent backed slowly against the wall The room started to swell, to shiver and creak His horrid insanity had reached its peak He saw Abercrombie, his zombie slave And heard his wife call from beyond the grave She spoke from her coffin and made ghoulish demands While, through cracking walls, reached skeleton hands Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams Swept his mad laughter to terrified screams! To escape the madness, he reached for the door But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor His voice was soft and very slow As he quoted The Raven from Edgar Allen Poe: “and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted? Nevermore…”
The Break by Anne Sexton It was also my violent heart that broke, falling down the front hall stairs. It was also a message I never spoke, calling, riser after riser, who cares about you, who cares, splintering up the hip that was merely made of crystal, the post of it and also the cup. I exploded in the hallway like a pistol. So I fell apart. So I came all undone. Yes. I was like a box of dog bones. But now they've wrapped me in like a nun. Burst like firecrackers! Held like stones! What a feat sailing queerly like Icarus until the tempest undid me and I broke. The ambulance drivers made such a fuss. But when I cried, "Wait for my courage!" they smoked and then they placed me, tied me up on their plate, and wheeled me out to their coffin, my nest. Slowly the siren slowly the hearse, sedate as a dowager. At the E. W. they cut off my dress. I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!" and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device, a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame. The orthopedic man declared, "You'll be down for a year." His scoop. His news. He opened the skin. He scraped. He pared and drilled through bone for his four-inch screws. That takes brute strength like pushing a cow up hill. I tell you, it takes skill and bedside charm and all that know how. The body is a damn hard thing to kill. But please don't touch or jiggle my bed. I'm Ethan Frome's wife. I'll move when I'm able. The T. V. hangs from the wall like a moose head. I hide a pint of bourbon in my bedside table. A bird full of bones, now I'm held by a sand bag. The fracture was twice. The fracture was double. The days are horizontal. The days are a drag. All of the skeleton in me is in trouble. Across the hall is the bedpan station. The urine and stools pass hourly by my head in silver bowls. They flush in unison in the autoclave. My one dozen roses are dead. The have ceased to menstruate. They hang there like little dried up blood clots. And the heart too, that cripple, how it sang once. How it thought it could call the shots! Understand what happened the day I fell. My heart had stammered and hungered at a marriage feast until the angel of hell turned me into the punisher, the acrobat. My bones are loose as clothespins, as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins revved up like an engine that would not stop. And now I spend all day taking care of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred. I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it. Yet lie a fire alarm it waits to be known. It is wired. In it many colors are stored. While my body's in prison, heart cells alone have multiplied. My bones are merely bored with all this waiting around. But the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche. The figures are placed at the grave of my bones. All figures knowing it is the other death they came for. Each figure standing alone. The heart burst with love and lost its breath. This little town, this little country is real and thus it is so of the post and the cup and thus of the violent heart. The zeal of my house doth eat me up.
When my thoughts are confused and muddled, I turn to poetry for comfort and clarity. Sometimes I find it in the Book of Psalms, sometimes in other places. "Mayakovsky," by Frank O'Hara, is my current favorite poem. O'Hara explains his poems, which are mainly autobiographical & free verse, this way: Mayakovsky by Frank O'Hara My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the fae his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing! then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets. I love you, I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool, and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry. Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head I embraced a cloud, but when I soared it rained. That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funy not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
Just one? Owch. Shel Silverstien is brilliant, but at the moment (it's likely to change in a couple days ) mine is probably Ozymandias by Percy Shelley. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Parsley, by Ogden Nash Parsley Is gharsley. Nah, maybe something by Robert Frost or Billy Collins. Actually, I'm quote fond of this poem as well: Epilogue, by Robert Lowell Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.
The Arrow and the Song I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Road not Taken - 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
Daddy by: Sylvia Plath You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. -- I adore Plath.
