Post Poems
Ms. Haiku
Washington DC Posts: 7,265
A thread to introduce us to each other's favorite poems, or just poems that interest us. Please post the poems that have sparked your interest that you think would spark others' interest. I think this has been done often before, but it can't be done enough, eh?
There is no such thing as leftover pizza. There is now pizza and later pizza. - anonymous
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
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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.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
While my hair was still cut straight
across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling
flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with
blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of
Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or
suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never
looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with
yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river
of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise
overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went
out,
By the gate now, the moss is grown,
the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in
wind.
The paired butterflies are already
yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
ETE don't you like this one, too?
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by.
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Or that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Or that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I always known: Love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Something moves
just beyond the mind's
clumsy fingers.
It has to do with seeds.
The earth's insomnia.
The garden going on
without us
needing no one
to watch it
not even the moon.
A Prophet In His Own Country
The gopher on his hind legs
is taut with holiness and fright.
Miniature and beardless,
he could be stoned or flooded out,
burnt alive in stubble fields,
martry to children for a penny a tail.
How can you not believe an animal
who goes down head first
into darkness, into the ceaseless
pull of gravity beneath him?
What faith that takes!
I come to him with questions
because I love his ears, how perfectly
they fit, how flat they lie against his head.
They hear the inner and the outer
worlds: what rain says
underground. The stone's praise
for the sparrow's ankle bone.
Little earth-otter, little dusty Lazarus,
he vanishes, he rises. He won't tell us
what he's seen.
Blizzard
Walking into wind, I lean into my mother's muskrat coat;
around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.
If we stood still we'd disappear. There's no up or down,
no houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind
and what's inside us. When we get home my father
will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.
I could lie down and stay right here where snow is all
that happens, and silence isn't loneliness just cold
not talking. My mother tugs at me and won't let go.
Then stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars
we don't know if anyone will understand
the tongue we speak, so far we are from home.
This might be my life in a little while, excellent piece
What you see in his face in the last
photograph, when ALS had whittled
his body to fit a wheelchair, is how much
stark work it took to fend death off, and fail.
The famous rage got eaten cell by cell.
His eyes are drawn to slits against the glate
of the blanched landscape. The day he died,
the story goes, a swash of dead whales
washed up on the Baja beach. Great nature grieved
for him, the story means, but it was great
nature that skewed his cells and siphoned
his force and melted his fat like tallow
and beached him in a wheelchair under
a sombrero. It was human nature,
tiny nature, to take the photograph,
to fuss with the aperture and speed, to let
in the right blare of light, just long enough
to etch pale Mingus to the negative.
In the small, memorial world of that
negative, he's all the light there is.
1419. Angry protestants stormed
the town hall and tossed Catholic council
members out the window. Those who survived
the fall were sped to the next life by pikes.
Of course Catholics were busy burning
heretics at one stake or another.
Did he who first learn to keep fire wait long
to think how crisp it might singe his neighbor?
1618 Three Catholics fell some
fifty feet from a palace window
to land on a dung heap and live to slink
away and thank God for landing in shit.
One side's miracle, the other's mistake.
Sides? Sides demean the vast loneliness
of prayer -- no answer, no neighbor, and death
flickering in you like a pilot light.
When every pencil meant a sacrafice
his parents boarded him at school in town
slaving to free him from the stony fields
the meagre acreage that bore them down
They blushed with pride when, at his graduation
they watched him picking up the slender scroll,
his passport from the years of brutal toil
and lonely patience in a barren hole
When he went in the Bank thier cups ran over
They marvelled how he wore a milk-white shirt
work days and jeans on Sundays. He was saved
from their thistle-strew farm and it's red dirt
And he said nothing. Hard and serious
like a young bear inside his teller's cage
his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills
aching with empty srength and throttled rage
-Alden Nowlan
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
This is very sharp. I don't know if I heard of him before. I haven't read some of the other poets, too. I hope people continue to post the poems/poets' work that they read. It's eye opening.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Maybe subconsciously, but I think all of my subjects are chosen subconsciously, I usually just start with images and places, or a single metaphor I needed to write down, and then expand from that. I don't often decide, "I'm going to write a sad poem about a lonely old man" but sometimes it just comes out that way.
But William Mathews is responsible for most of my style, the way he ends some of his stanzas in the middle of a line, the setup of the poem, the desire to find crisp images, all these things I get from him. He's the poet I fell in love with first, so no matter how many I read, he'll always be in the back of my mind.
vincent van
gogh perched
on those pennsylvania
cornfields communing
amid secret black
bird societies. yes.
i’m sure that was
you exploding your
fantastic delirium
while in the
distance
red indian
hills beckoned.
-- Sonia Sanchez
(it is full on fall here, and this poem just makes me think about the orange of the sky and the black lines of trees and crows -- everything crisp and fall. )
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
The last light of a July evening drained
into the streets below. My love and I had
things to say and hear, and we sat over
wine, faltering, picking our words carefully.
The afternoon before I had lain across
my bed and my cat leapt up to lie
alongside me, purring and slowly
growing dozy. By this ritual I could
clear some clutter from my baroque brain.
And into that brief vacancy the image
of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,
and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt
and fear. How did we do? A medium job,
which is well above average. But because
she had opened her heart to me as far
as she did, I saw her fierce privacy,
like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung
with disappointments, and I knew
that to love her I must love the tree
and the nothing it cares for me.
oh goodie!
biblio, smooches to you.
(have you ever read "just don't never give up on love"?)
"No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love."
We hugged; then she walked her 84-year-old walk down the street. A black woman. Echoing gold. Carrying couplets from the sky to crease the ground.
[the end]
Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.