Post your favourite Poems

[shive1]

Wow...it must be forty years or more since I last read that. Thanks for posting it.

Sarge

You're welcome!  I'm quite a fan of Guest's poetry. You can still find his books easily, and they're very worthwhile.

[маразм1]

Маленький мальчик гранату нашёл.
"Что это,папа?"-к отцу подашёл.
"Дёрни калечко",-папа сказал,
а сам потехоньку в овраг отползал.
Маленький мальчик был не дурак:
дёрнул колечко и бросил в овраг...
Взрыв прогремел,полетели калоши-
Мальчик в восторге захлопал в ладоши.

here's my translation of this poem:

A little boy found a grenade
"What is this, daddy?" he went to his dad.
"Pull out the ring here, my dear sonny",
Dad said as he crawled into a gully.

Son followed instructions, he was no dummy:
He hurled the grenade into the gully.
An explosion followed, dad shat his pants--
The boy was excitedly clapping his hands.

[Ephemerid]

This is from Octavio Paz' book-length run-on sentence poem, Sunstone-- some ten years ago I read this aloud to myself & it was like a revelation!  (since then I think all poems *should* be read aloud if possible):

—when was life ever truly ours?
when are we ever what we are?
we are ill-reputed, nothing more
than vertigo and emptiness, a frown in the mirror,
horror and vomit, life is never
truly ours, it always belongs to the others,
life is no one's, we all are life—
bread of the sun for the others,
the others that we all are—
when I am I am another, my acts
are more mine when they are the acts
of others, in order to be I must be another,
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don't exist
if I don't exist, the others that give me
total existence, I am not,
there is no I, we are always us,
life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away,
hunger for being, oh death, our bread...

[Ephemerid]

FOR A COMING EXTINCTION   


Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important


                                     ~ W.S. Merwin

[Ephemerid]

I've just been thumbing through a collection of Japanese death poems I haven't read in a good while (ed. by Yoel Hoffmann-- a very good book):

I thought to live
two centuries, or three--
yet here comes death
to me, a child
of just eighty-five years.

           ~ Hanabusa Ikkei

[mahler10th]

The hunchback in the park

The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That let the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Hunchbacked in mockery
Dodging the park-keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell-time
A woman's figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and the chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees and the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.


http://www.undermilkwood.net/poetry_thehunchback.html

[Guido]

I thought I'd posted this here before, but apparently not. One of my favourite poems, not that I am by any means a connoisseur:

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven.

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,   
Enwrought with golden and silver light,   
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths   
Of night and light and the half light,   
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;   
I have spread my dreams under your feet;   
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.   

W.B. Yeats (1899)

Another poem, this one humourous/horror. I remember studying it at school.

He left her lying in the nude
That sultry night in May.
The neighbors thought it rather rude;
He liked her best that way.

He left a rose beside her head,
A meat axe in her brain.
A note upon the bureau read:
"I won't be back again."

Raymond Chandler

[Saul]

Маленький мальчик гранату нашёл.
"Что это,папа?"-к отцу подашёл.
"Дёрни калечко",-папа сказал,
а сам потехоньку в овраг отползал.
Маленький мальчик был не дурак:
дёрнул колечко и бросил в овраг...
Взрыв прогремел,полетели калоши-
Мальчик в восторге захлопал в ладоши.

here's my translation of this poem:

A little boy found a grenade
"What is this, daddy?" he went to his dad.
"Pull out the ring here, my dear sonny",
Dad said as he crawled into a gully.

Son followed instructions, he was no dummy:
He hurled the grenade into the gully.
An explosion followed, dad shat his pants--
The boy was excitedly clapping his hands.

You call this a Poem?

[Ephemerid]

This one is a bit different for Robinson Jeffers (brace yourself-- this one is a real tear-jerker!):


THE HOUSE-DOG'S GRAVE
(Haig, an English bulldog)


I've changed my ways a little: I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream: and you, if yu dream a moment,
You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed: no, all the nights through
I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read-- and I fear often grieving for me--
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long it is hard
To think of you ever dying.
A little dog would get tired living so long.
I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dears, that's too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been,

And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided....
But to me you were true.

You were never my masters, but friends.  I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved.  Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end.  If this is my end,
I am not lonely.  I am not afraid.  I am still yours.

                                             ~ Robinson Jeffers

[Ephemerid]

BECAUSE


They'll go to the moon
                 and beyond,
to places even telescopes can't see.
But when will no one go hungry
                                  on earth
                 or fear others
                 or push them around,
                 shun them
                 or steal their hope?
Because I responded to this question
                              I'm called a communist.

                      ~ Nazim Hikmet

[Ephemerid]

Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder.  Oh the vastness
of the stars.  Their rising and descent.  How still.
As if I didn't exist.  Do I have any
share in this?  Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect?  Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes?  Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its furthest spaces.  Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

                      ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
                         (tr. Stephen Mitchell)

[mozartsneighbor]

I felt like having a thread with poetry -- and I discovered there already was one. So here are my contributions, and I hope some people would like to keep this going again. I really enjoyed many of the poems already posted.

Fernando Pessoa

Crown me with roses,
Crown me truly
With roses --
Roses that fade
On a soon fading
Face.
Crown me with roses
And brief-lived leaves.
And that is enough.


Fernando Pessoa
The Gazette

Of the Lloyd Georges of Babylon
History says nothing.
Of the Briands of Assyria or Egypt,
Of the Trotskys of some Greek or Roman
Colony long past,
The name is dead, though still written.

Only a fool of a poet, or
A philosophizing madman,
Survives that such great little
That lies back there in the dark
And that not even history records!

Oh great men of the Moment!
Oh great simmering glories
From whom obscurity flees!
Enjoy without thought!
Occupy yourselves with fame and spoils,
Because tomorrow belongs to today's madmen!


my own translation from Portuguese

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

A wry one on a rainy day:

Happy Birthday

Even after a person
is gone from this world,
people often tend
to remember birthdays.

They say: today is
the birthday of someone
who would have been
so many years old.

So just in case you're
not around next year:
happy birthday.

-Thomas Ligotti (from DEATH POEMS)

[sound67]

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

I remember this was the first poem I "heard" at university, as one of our American Studies profs delighted in reciting it over and over and over in the course of his American Poems I lecture series. Later, I grew quite fond of it.

Thomas

[vandermolen]

The General

"Good-morning, good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
.   .   .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

(Siegfried Sassoon 1917)

[vandermolen]

I sent my Soul through the invisible,
Some Letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald trans.)

[Chosen Barley]

RL Stevenson's Requiem.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longs to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

[vandermolen]

RL Stevenson's Requiem.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longs to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Great poem. Thanks. I love Stevenson's work, especially Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  0:)/

ps Welcome to the Forum!

[mozartsneighbor]

Before Leonard Cohen was a musician, he was a poet. And he has continued writing poetry. The lyrics to his songs are often excellent poems.

Here's one of the oldies:

Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen

Suzanne takes you down to
her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body
with your mind.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body
with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body
with her mind.

[DavidRoss]

For Anne

With Annie gone,
Whose eyes to compare with the morning sun?
Not that I did compare,
But I do compare now that she's gone.

                            --Leonard Cohen