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favorite poems

I've never been one to seek out poetry and I tend to like the funny ones best. But I read this one as a teenager, and it stuck with me. I think it's that last line.



Eating Poetry
Mark Strand


Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
 
I'll leave the translation as an exercise to the reader.
PAQUITO by Salvador Díaz Mirón
Cubierto de jiras,
al ábrego hirsutas
al par que las mechas
crecidas y rubias,
el pobre chiquillo
se postra en la tumba,
y en voz de sollozos
revienta y murmura:
«Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.

«¡Qué bien que me acuerdo!
La tarde de lluvia;
las velas grandotas
que olían a curas;
y tú en aquel catre
tan tiesa, tan muda,
tan fría, tan seria,
y así tan rechula!
Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.

«Buscando comida,
revuelvo basura.
Si pido limosna,
la gente me insulta,
me agarra la oreja,
me dice granuja,
y escapo con miedo
de que haya denuncia.
Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.

«Los otros muchachos
se ríen, se burlan,
se meten conmigo,
y a poco me acusan
de pleito al gendarme
que viene a la bulla;
y todo, porque ando
con tiras y sucias.
Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.

«Me acuesto en rincones
solito y a obscuras.
De noche, ya sabes,
los ruidos me asustan.
Los perros divisan
espantos y aúllan.
Las ratas me muerden,
las piedras me punzan...
Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.

«Papá no me quiere.
Está donde juzga
y riñe a los hombres
que tienen la culpa.
Si voy a buscarlo,
él bota la pluma,
se pone muy bravo,
me ofrece una tunda.
Mamá, soy Paquito;
no haré travesuras».

Y un cielo impasible
despliega su curva.
Click to expand...
 
I don't have a particular favorite, but here is the kind of stuff I like. This might not even necessarily be a favorite, but it is the kind of thing I like, and I thought it made for a good example.

"Something I can never have", by Nine Inch Nails

I still recall the taste of your tears.
Echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears.
My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore.
Scraping through my head 'till I don't want to sleep anymore.

[Chorus:]
Come on tell me.
You make this all go away.
You make this all go away.
I'm down to just one thing.
And I'm starting to scare myself.
You make this all go way.
You make this all go way.
I just want something.
I just want something I can never have

You always were the one to show me how
Back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now.
This thing is slowly taking me apart.
Grey would be the color if I had a heart.
Come on tell me

[Chorus]

In this place it seems like such a shame.
Though it all looks different now,
I know it's still the same
Everywhere I look you're all I see.
Just a fading ****ing reminder of who I used to be.

[Chorus]

I just want something.
I just want something I can never have
I just want something I can never have

Think I know what you meant.
That night on my bed.
Still picking at this scab
I wish you were dead.
You sweat and perry ellis.
Just stains on my sheets.
 
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Kipling.
"McAndrew's Hymn", or "The Gods of the Copybook Headings",
or many more.
 
For start, the poems that Skeptic posted are my favorite too especially "The Wasteland". I owe this poem my real first name.

One from memory.

"There is something about you
that opens and closes...
I don't know exactly what it is
but something in me understands...
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses
nobody, not even the rain has such small hands..."

e.e.cummings.

I adore Swinburne and because of one post of mine about him Demon brought to my attention another poet that was lost with my PMs :( Demon if you read that please post the poem.

Love and Sleep

Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said -
I wist not what, saving one word - Delight.

And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.
 
Here's another one by Ryokan that might be appropriate :)

Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry.
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Second the Carroll (especially "Jabberwocky" :D) and the Kipling (especially "Tommy Atkins"). I read "Ulysses" by Tennyson when I retired from the Navy. I had to memorize it in Jr. High, it's still one of my favorites. Some other good ones:
"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot http://www.prufrock.org/poem/fulltext.html
"Ode on Solitude" by Pope
http://www.island-of-freedom.com/POPE2.HTM
"Let America Be America" by Hughes
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609
"When I Heard the Learned Astronomer" by Whitman
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16083
 
A poem every skeptic should commit to memory:
Last night in the twighlight gloom,
A butterfly flew in my room.
Oh what beauty! Oh what grace!
Who needs visitors from outer space?
----Spike Milligan
Click to expand...
 
WARNING TO CHILDREN - Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string


And now my favourite short-short poem:

MAKING COCOA FOR KINGSLEY AMIS
by Wendy Cope
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title.
 
To A Stranger

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

--Walt Whitman
 
I have always been rather fond of this one.


Sonnet XVII: Love

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

-- Pablo Neruda
 
Here's another sample of some song lyrics I really like. Like I said before, I consider song lyrics to be a form of poetry. And the music gives them a stronger emotional impact to me.

These lyrics remind me of how our lives change, and we go through different phases. Many things come and go in our lives. People, family members, places we live (ever had great memories of somewhere else you used to live?), hobbies, jobs, etc. When I hear this song or read these lyrics, it reminds me of some great times that I've had in my life, that I will never experience again. Of course, I'll experience OTHER great times. But what I mean is remembering some favorable experiences that I'm not going to have again. For example, I moved a while back. It was a major move, and I left a lot of people behind. Haven't seen them or talked to them in years, and probably never will again. I don't even know how to get in touch with some of them even if I really wanted to. I have new friends now, and I have a great, happy life. But I still remember the friends I used to have. These lyrics remind me to cherish the great memories we have.


When I find out all the reasons
Maybe I'll find another way
Find another day
With all the changing seasons of my life
Maybe I'll get it right next time
And now that you've been broken down
Got your head out of the clouds
You're back down on the ground
And you don't talk so loud
You don't walk so proud
Any more, and what for

Well I jumped into the river
Too many times to make it home
I'm out here on my own, an drifting all alone
If it doesn't show give it time
To read between the lines
'Cause I see the storm getting closer
And the waves they get so high
Seems everything We've ever known's here
Why must it drift away and die

I'll never find anyone to replace you
Guess I'll have to make it thru, this time- Oh this time
Without you

I knew the storm was getting closer
And all my friends said I was high
But everything we've ever known's here
I never wanted it to die

Axl Rose - "Estranged"
 
We sit together,
the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains.
- Li Po

The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when wind was in my way;
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and love is all.
- Theodore Roethke, Four for Sir John Davies, 4. The Vigil
 
A longtime favorite of mine, by Karl Shapiro...

THE FLY


Oh hideous little bat the size of snot,

With polyhedral eyes and shabby clothes,

To populate the stinking cat you walk

The promontory of the dead man's nose,



Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan Phyfe

The smoking mountains of my food

And in a comic mood

In mid-air take to bed a wife.



Riding and riding with your filth of hair

On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,

Hot from the compost and green sweet decay

Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy;

You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool;

In the tight belly of the dead

Burrow with hungry head

And inlay maggots like a jewel.



At your approach the great horse stomps and paws

Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail;

Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand

Which sweeps against you like an angry flail;

Still you return, return, trusting your wing

To draw you from the hunter's reach

That learns to kill to teach

Disorder to the tinier thing.



My peace is your disaster. For your death

Children like spiders cup their pretty hands

And wives resort to chemistry of war.

In fens of sticky paper and quicksands

You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck

You struggle hideously and beg;

You amputate your leg

Imbedded in the amber muck.



But I, a man, must swat you with my hate,

Slap you across the air and crush your flight,

Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood,

Expose your little guts pasty and white,

Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard's hat,

Pin your wings under like a crow's,

Tear off your flimsy clothes

And beat you as one beats a rat.



Then like Gargantua I stride among

The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust,

The broken bodies of the narrow dead

That catch the thrust with fingers of disgust.

I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls

And stunned, stone blind, and deaf

Buzzes it's frightful F

And dies between three cannibals.
 
LibraryLady said:
One more from me, before the shutdown. I can't think how I didn't mention this one up front. I chant it to myself in times of stress; somehow it always calms me.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Wallace Stevens.

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Click to expand...

A friend and I did a class presentation on this in high school. We had to do some kind of audio-visual interpretation thingy (it's been something like 20 years, so I can't recall exactly.) My friend created an interesting collage of music snippets to be played after each verse, and I created collages from construction paper cuttings and simple drawings, projected on an opaque projector. Our teacher was impressed by our presentation and kept it for future use--we were so proud!
 
One favorite by Harold Pinter



Cancer Cells


"Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die".
(Nurse, Royal Marsden Hospital)

They have forgotten how to die
And so extend their killing life.

I and my tumour dearly fight.
Let's hope a double death is out.

I need to see my tumour dead
A tumour which forgets to die
But plans to murder me instead.

But I remember how to die
Though all my witnesses are dead.
But I remember what they said
Of tumours which would render them
As blind and dumb as they had been
Before the birth of that disease
Which brought the tumour into play.

The black cells will dry up and die
Or sing with joy and have their way.
They breed so quietly night and day,
You never know, they never say.

Harold Pinter, March 2002
 
Words of blind men rage, sobs canter among the willows
Evermore the tragedies outscore the gentle peccadilloes
Songs of desire age, rhymes flutter the words no clearer
Banish then the affections again and beauty left no nearer
Though pains dare assuage, death nibbles from in the marrow
Bearing hard on layman and on bard the slow and burning arrow
The gods thus uncage thy soul lost to hell’s own glory
Heed now this to discover thee bliss the sad and lonely story

Ours is not to love like the majestic eagles fly
Ours is to want and want again lest we wither up die
 
I love Kipling, particularly Gunga Din and The Ballad of East and West.

Lewis Carroll, yet another vote for Jabberwocky!

A. A. Milne, I was practically raised on Winnie The Pooh.

T. S. Eliot - Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est.

Rabbie Burns. My birthday is January 25, and I used to go out with a Scots lass who decided that my birthday celebration should be a Burns Night supper. This of course required me to recite the ode To A Haggis. Unfortunately Burns cannot be read without a Scots accent, and my girlfriend was in stitches at my attempt!
 
wollery said:
Rabbie Burns. My birthday is January 25, and I used to go out with a Scots lass who decided that my birthday celebration should be a Burns Night supper. This of course required me to recite the ode To A Haggis. Unfortunately Burns cannot be read without a Scots accent, and my girlfriend was in stitches at my attempt!
Click to expand...
As you can see from my sig, I am a Burns fan as well. One of the highlights of my trip to LA this past may was a visit to the library/museum at the Huntingdon gardens; Renata or Scrut can vouch for the fact that I was practically drooling over the various beautifully-preserved first editions, and wanted to steal most of them. One amazing book was Burns, not a first edition, but actually in his own handwriting. Oh. My. Ed. But to see it was to want it....or words to that effect.

Another poem there, in a first edition, has always been a favorite. Not Burns this time, but John Donne's "Air and Angels":

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
 
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