Post your favourite Poems

[secondwind]

Here's a poem for everyone who ever suffered the sweaty-palmed agonies of the dreaded piano recital as a young child.

Recital

by Lisa Russ Spaar

In the teacher's kitchen, we fidgeted
and were told to hush among the gladioli
presiding over trays of tri-tiered sandwiches

and the punchbowl of sherbet ice floes
swimming in ginger ale for afterwards.
If only it were afterwards,

and not the agony of before,
the memorized staves crisscrossing
our brains like fences gored

with all the notes that could--
and probably would--go wrong.
I blame those first recitals

for setting up a sham of perfection
beyond the limits of my body
and my ability:  the mortification

of hurtling through what should instead be
music--flawed and surprising--
before an audience of shamefully

smiling instigators, as fearful as we,
suddenly, that their lives would be exposed
in one misstruck key, or two, or three. . .

[secondwind]

It seems hard to believe that just a few short weeks ago the Washington DC area, where I live, was buried under three feet of snow.  Now the daffodils and tulips are in bloom and the flowering trees are beginning to show their stuff and, well, it's a different world!  Which makes me think of some of my favorite spring poems. 

Here are two I love by the American poet e. e. cummings.  The first, I think, is a child's view of spring, with its breathless rhythms, the sights and sounds of a child's games outdoors, and the joyous physicality of a world that is "mud-luscious".

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and  wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
   the
goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

The second, far more reflective and less exuberant, is a more mature view of the season, expressing a quietly awed respect for the transformative power of that unseen hand that is observed to be "changing everything carefully . . . without breaking anything."


Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

What are your favorite poems of the season?

[Chosen Barley]

The poem by Lisa Spaar reminded me that these terrifying situations for children  are really not what music is about. 

[Keemun]

I love poems that evoke images of scenes and seasons.  Here is one I particularly like.

Late September

by Charles Simic

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

[Florestan]

La Primavera

(Allegro)
Giunt' è la primavera e festosetti
La salutan gl' augei con lieto canto,
E i fonti allo spirar de'zeffiretti
Con dolce mormorio scorrono intanto:
Vengon' coprendo l' aer di nero amanto
E lampi, e tuoni ad annuntiarla eletti
Indi tacendo questi, gl' augelletti;
Tornan' di nuovo al lor canoro incanto:

(Largo)
E quindi sul fiorito ameno prato
Al caro mormorio di fronde e piante
Dorme 'l caprar col fido can' à lato.

(Allegro)
Di pastoral zampogna al suon festante
Danzan ninfe e pastor nel tetto amato
Di primavera all' apparir brillante.

[secondwind]

Florestan, I'd say "that's Greek to me" except that it's probably Italian. . .  Keemun, I liked the Simic September poem (even out of season).  There are some great images in it--the bored seagull who lifts a leg and forgets to put it down, for example.  And Chosen Barley, I try to keep that Spaar poem in mind whenever I enter one of my self-pitying phases where I think of how different my life would be if only I had had piano lessons as a child!

[mahler10th]

Dylan Thomas reading his own "And Death shall have no Dominion".

http://rapidshare.com/files/369507816/thomas_under_milk_wood__1954__return_journey_to_swansea_se_1_poems_20_and_death_shall_have_no_dom.mp.html

[snyprrr]

Goodbye Christ by Langston Hughes







yea,... no,...I'm kidding

[Chosen Barley]

Maybe Florestan will like this.  I sure do; I happened upon it while looking for instructions on starting flower seed (didiscus aka 'blue lace flower'). 

"The smell of violets, hidden in the green
Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame
The times when I remembered to have
been Joyful and free from blame."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

[Florestan]

Florestan, I'd say "that's Greek to me" except that it's probably Italian. . .

Yes, and supposedly written by one Antonio Vivaldi no less. It's the sonnet accompanying The Spring's score. Full translation here.

Maybe Florestan will like this.  I sure do; I happened upon it while looking for instructions on starting flower seed (didiscus aka 'blue lace flower'). 

"The smell of violets, hidden in the green
Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame
The times when I remembered to have
been Joyful and free from blame."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Superb. Which poem is it extracted from?

[Chosen Barley]

Those lovely lines are from A Dream of Fair Women. 

I hope you have an actual book of poems that you can hold in your hands if you wish to read the whole thing. 

[Florestan]

Those lovely lines are from A Dream of Fair Women. 

I hope you have an actual book of poems that you can hold in your hands if you wish to read the whole thing.

Unfortunately I haven't, but the Internet is the next best solution.

[Ten thumbs]

Dylan Thomas reading his own "And Death shall have no Dominion".

One of my favorites for a long time: reminds me of this:

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life--that in me has rest,
As I--undying Life--have power in thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The stedfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou--THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

Emily Brontë

It would be quite a challenge to set either of these poems to music!

[secondwind]

Well, their time is already gone for this year, so like Wordsworth, I just have to remember them now--daffodils, banks of them, hundreds of them, waving in the early spring breeze. . .

The Daffodils       
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
   That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

[Florestan]

The Daffodils       
by William Wordsworth

One of the greatest poems ever written.

[jowcol]

I must admit that I'm a fan of some of the darker poets.  This one seems to capture the moods I feel on late night walks.  It isn't as horrifying as some of her other late works.

Sylvia Plath - The Moon And The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky ----
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness ----
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness -- blackness and silence

[Franco]

The Memoirs of Jesse James

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

- Richard Brautigan

[DavidRoss]

Ahhh...poor Richard Brautigan.  Tough enough to be schizophrenic, or depressive, or alcoholic, without being all three.  A friend of mine from the old days got to witness him trying to drink himself to death in a seedy room in San Francisco, before he finished the job quick with a bullet to the brain.  Still, there's a legacy of lovely writing left by this terribly troubled soul.

This morning a friend introduced me to a lovely haiku by Luanne Rice, from her novel, The Geometry of Sisters:

Light splits the dark cloud
Silver pours down from the sky.
Rain stops for today.

I love the image of sunlight pouring down like silver through a gap in the clouds after it rains.

[jowcol]

A fun thing to make from poems is a "wordle" or tag cloud-- you can do this at www.wordle.net.

Not sure if this link will work, but here is Poe's The Bells:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1896132/Poe%27s_the_Bells

[Sergeant Rock]

It's always dangerous to submit one's own poetry to the world (as John Berryman said, Whenever you show someone your scribblings, you run the risk of making a fool of yourself). But I'm a bit nostalgic today and I feel, again like John Berryman, that some of my deepest feelings are for what has past: "accomodating idealistic regrets more readily than present joys."  And anyway, this is one of my favorite poems 


AUBADE FOR MISS KIM
   
(Yobo is a Korean term of affection between lovers)
   
I stood beside you in the chill October
morn and you so warm, Kim Kil Cha, cocooned nude
in the fat, garish quilt, your flesh like fire
hidden. Yobo, you wake? Come back to bed...
Come... I think on these things as I read her

old letters of pressed clover and flower,
once letters of luck, the stationary of spring.
But twenty-eight autumns crumble like leaves
in my hand, dusty and dried to a sullen
yellow, a terminal gangrene.

Raked by the years, I see you standing
where the sadness ran so deep that morning,
in the doorway, a stricken Butterfly
in the dawn, the servant at your side, smiling,
dustrag in hand, waving goodbye, goodbye...

But you, Kil Cha, you my love, my yobo,
said nothing, moved not in the morning chill.
Your final word, your last goodbye, a soundless O
but I heard what you felt, I felt you cry, No!
It doth make me still...


Sarge