you all wanted a poetry thread

[bay]

Here's one

VASILIS
By Marie

His new American name is bill.
He almost dances as he walks along the streets of Denver.
Something good feels just about to happen.
It’s true, the lamentations of the village mothers,
Who read catastrophe in every tea cup,
Still echo in his head. But dimly.
And no matter how sly the village priest is,
He will not suddenly appear around the corner,
For he is half a world away.
These ears are not for boxing anymore, thinks Bill.

But he worries about his mother…
This very moment, his father, Yiannis, is likely
Sitting on a platform in ‘his tree.’ ‘Life is a donkey,’
Yiannis might call down, lifting his jug.
He will work himself in to a rage: the land is barren;
he has bad fate; he has been sorely cheated.
Vasilis knows (doesn’t everyone) his father drinks
Rather than till the soil or harvest grapes.
His mother, Maria, does the chores. Even so,

Bill can’t forget his father’s eyes when they said
Good-bye. Apples are ripening now
And grapes fermenting in the Palio Vraha, where houses
Slope downhill and even the village square is slant.
Maria leans from the doorway scattering crumbs
Her sweet face is as weathered as an apple
Forgotten on the branch. She says his name,
‘Vasili.’ Then whispers the diminutive,
“Vasilaki mou.’

No little goat will welcome him tonight,
Will push at him her nuzzling head. His Nina.
Bill’s hand curves ‘round a memory.
In; the middle of his springy Denver step,
His father’s face and Nina’s swim before him –
A quizzical, lambent, red-eyed blend.
In the middle of excitement,
He is also sad.

Bill works at the Olympia Barber Shop; cleans
And sweeps the floor. Sometimes
He is allowed to wring hot water from a towel
And place it on a beard-rough face.
The customers, Greek middle-aged bachelors,
Like to sit and gossip.
The call Vasilis blondie for his golden chestnut hair
And give him plenty of advice. Every day,
When they hear music from the Greek café next door,

Vasilis pauses in his work. The strum of a bouzouki
Makes his body want to dance. The barber,
Leonidas, pauses too; his straight-edge glistening in mid-air,
He nods at Bill ‘Yia sou, Vasili,’ he says.
In Palio Vraha villagers dance the Tsamiko
And Kalamatiano to music of pipiza and santouri,
Violin and lute.

Amidst the scent of wild flowers and sun-warmed
Thyme, his mother and father – for the moment
Not at odds – his cousins and his neighbors,
All weariness gone, join hands to form a circle in the square.
White stockings, foustanellas, full skirts and spangled
Vests flash to the rhythm of the hills.
Echoes of Roumeli …

Vasilis’ early scene is sculpted in his spare
Essential face. Mongolian cheekbones catch the light.
Quick temper, quickly gone. And ready tears.
Not a weeper’s or a moaner’s kind, but those swift
Tears that clear the eye,
And keep it seeing how things really are.
‘And that,’ an old village woman used to say,
‘that is the why of tears.’

Will his father see more clearly now that he
And Maria are alone, the two of them?
Just Yiannis and Maria. Whose son sends money
From America. No, thinks Bill, he will go on drinking wine.
He will rage like an angry parrot in his perch.
He will fall asleep on a platform wedged in a tree.

While Maria tries to keep the cock from crowing.
What a plague of thoughts!
And yet …
Bill almost dances when he walks
Along the streets of Denver.
Something in his heart can’t be contained.
One more step and he will fly.

[An Céachta Dearg]

Raglan Road

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.

Inniskeen Road: July Evening

The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

[bay]

this was written by my Aunt Marie just shortly before she died. She wrote the poem above about my grandfather, her father. Marie and her husband Rich taught me about leftism, the arts, music, humanity, literature. I love them.

http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/4141/auntmarie1awu9.jpg
Exodus, by Marie Thurman

When the thin envelopes we live in are exhausted
imagine uncontained the place
of thoughts, that place where memory resides;
imagine the very impulse of those thoughts
and memories unloosed.
Think of the words, commas, and parentheses,
the language we devise. Imagine the ‘how’ of these scattering, the ‘where’
disbanded – our charged dust
born by winds, rising, falling – the almost-nothing
carried off through space, flung
into forming stars, or sucked into black holes
a countless many light years out. Or, even
earthbound, riding local breezes ‘round the world. A cradle song I used to know tells how a mother’s
heart, gone to the distant cold, glows
like a planet in the dark; tells how a father’s star teeth
smile across the night.
And child squint through the ages, searching for hearts
and smiles in shifting constellations, finds dogs and bears
as well, and milky lights
out there, where once co-dwelling nanonauts
those scatterings of our immateriality,
might pass each other as they drift along. Does their journey waver then? In a brief dance
of electrical affinity, equivalent to hand-clutched hearts,
do they exchange the shiver of familiars brushing by?

[Lightweaver]

Hail the Morrigan!
Triple Goddess of
both death and fertility,
of battle and cattle.
Hail, Morrigan!
Pass over the innocent
when you choose those
who will die in battle.
Look, Lady, instead
to the evil old men
who profit from the deaths
of our young warriors and warrioresses.
Call your crows, instead,
Great Mother, to K Street,
and Pennsylvania Avenue, and
Downing Street.
Call your crows, instead,
Magnificent Lady of the Carrion,
to the homes of those made rich and fat
by oil and this evil war for oil.
Hail, Morrigan!

By Hecate who has a blog site at http://hecatedemetersdatter.blogspot.com/

[Phædrus]

There once was a man from West Texas,
Who thought he could just disrespect us.
So he ran for election,
But his odd predilection,
Made Iraq the main terrorist nexus.


Haiku:

I never looked at
Where I was going in life
Then I hit a tree.

"Forsooth!" did he cry,
As the banner they did raise,
"Another Starbucks!"

[donquixote99]

Bay, your aunt's poem makes me think of Omar Khayyam--there are quite a few verses that work with dust and clay images...

For I remember stopping by the way
To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay
And with its all-obliterated Tongue
It murmur'd--"Gently, Brother, gently, pray!"

[donquixote99]

Interior


Her mind lives in a quiet room,
A narrow room, and tall,
With pretty lamps to quench the gloom
And mottoes on the wall.


There all the things are waxen neat
And set in decorous lines;
And there are posies, round and sweet,
And little straightened vines.


Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart,
Out wailing in the rain.

[Phædrus]

I went out to take a friggin' walk by the friggin' reservoir,
a-wishin' for a friggin' quid to pay my friggin' score,
my head it was a-achin' and my throat was parched and dry,
and so I sent a little prayer, a-wingin' to the sky...

And there came a friggin' falcon and he walked upon the waves,
and I said, "A friggin' miracle!" and sang a couple staves,
of a friggin' churchy ballad I learned when I was young.
The friggin' bird took to the air, and spattered me with dung.

I fell upon my friggin' knees and bowed my friggin' head,
and said three friggin' Aves for all my friggin' dead,
and then I got upon my feet and said another ten.
The friggin' bird burst into flame - and spattered me again.

The burnin' bird hung in the sky just like a friggin' sun.
It seared my friggin' eyelids shut, and when the job was done,
the friggin' bird flashed cross the sky just like a shootin' star.
I ran to tell the friggin' priest - he bummed my last cigar.

I told him of the miracle, he told me of the Rose,
I showed him bird crap in my hair, the bastard held his nose.
I went to see the bishop but the friggin' bishop said,
"Go home and sleep it off, you sod - and wash your friggin' head!"

Then I came upon a friggin' wake for a friggin' rotten swine,
by the name of Jock O'Leary and I touched his head with mine,
and old Jock sat up in his box and raised his friggin' head.
His wife took out a forty-four, and shot the bastard dead.

Again I touched his head with mine and brought him back to life.
His smiling face rolled on the floor, this time she used a knife.
And then she fell upon her knees, and started in to pray,
"It's forty years, O Lord," she said, "I've waited for this day."

So I walked the friggin' city 'mongst the friggin' halt and lame,
and every time I raised them up, they got knocked down again,
'cause the love of God comes down to man in a friggin' curious way,
but when a man is marked for love, that love is here to stay.

And this I know because I've got a friggin' curious sign;
for every time I wash my head, the water turns to wine!
And I gives it free to workin' blokes to brighten up their lives,
so they don't kick no dogs around, nor beat up on their wives.

'Cause there ain't no use to miracles like walkin' on the sea;
They crucified the Son of God, but they don't muck with me!
'Cause I leave the friggin' blind alone, the dyin' and the dead,
but every day at four o'clock, I wash my friggin' head!

- The Friggin Falcon, by Theodore R. Cogswell

[Chookie]

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

I learned a safety rule
I don’t know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation
and the corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn’t nice but it’s reality

(chorus)

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen
who want to guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and greed
Get rich... get rich quick.

chorus...

We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailed
and still Peltier goes off to jail

chorus...

My girlfriend Annie Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of exposure
Loo loo loo loo loo

chorus...

We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl and still our history gets
written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya "Honey, you can still be an Indian
d-d-down at the ‘Y’
on Saturday nights"
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh!

[quirk]

HOWL

by Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night


Footnote To Howl

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!

[donquixote99]

For a change, Quirk, I think you should have posted a video. Howl in text form is just a script.

[donquixote99]

Exclusion


The Soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the Door;
On her divine Majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the Chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an Emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.


Emily Dickinson (1862)

[Viv]

I do not believe this forum...it is so strange to me...

As Chookie pointed out, I am in the habit of posting a poetry thread in every forum I visit. Rarely do I not.

I had become discouraged because usually one or two people will post something there to be polite or it may be a particular poem they know of... Most people do not engage with poetry.

This is the only forum where people who post look like they may have read and studied a poem for more than the length of time it takes to google and post it. Am I imagining this?

Of course, the Irish are known for literary interest...

[Phædrus]

Some say the world will end in fire;
some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those that favor fire.
But if it had to happen twice,
I think I know enough of hate,
to say that for destruction, ice
is also great
and would suffice.

- Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

I like that poem, even though it's a tad short.

[donquixote99]

I agree this is an unusual forum. Good thing, too.

[Chookie]

Most people do not engage with poetry.

This, I think, is because the experience most people have of poetry is being forced to learn by heart, at an early age, some utterly revolting (to the victim, at that particular time) poem.

In my case it was in primary school, and my English teacher "just looooooooooooved" Wordsworths' Daffodils (you know the one:- "I wandered lonely as a cloud etc etc"). We suffered that poem at least twice a week for a full term. Scarred for life so I was.

[Viv]

This, I think, is because the experience most people have of poetry is being forced to learn by heart, at an early age, some utterly revolting (to the victim, at that particular time) poem.

In my case it was in primary school, and my English teacher "just looooooooooooved" Wordsworths' Daffodils (you know the one:- "I wandered lonely as a cloud etc etc"). We suffered that poem at least twice a week for a full term. Scarred for life so I was.

Quite like that one, Chookie. Can you recite it for me?:p

[An Céachta Dearg]

Requiem for the Croppies


The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

Seamus Heaney

[An Céachta Dearg]

What are your favourite poets??

Personally I love the works of Kavanagh some of his poems like Advent are so so soul searching. And then the affintity to the and in Shankoduff.

I'm a big fan of American poets Sylvia Platt and Robert Frost particurly Frost who I think is absolutly amazing.

[Viv]

Strangely, an Irishman read this to me, close by the grave of Sir John Moore in the sunshine of La Coruna, in Galicia, Northern Spain. The memory will stay with me...

NOT a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lanthorn dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed
And smooth'd down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow!

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him—
But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.

[Viv]

What are your favourite poets??

Personally I love the works of Kavanagh some of his poems like Advent are so so soul searching. And then the affintity to the and in Shankoduff.

I'm a big fan of American poets Sylvia Platt and Robert Frost particurly Frost who I think is absolutly amazing.

Eclectic, like my taste in music. It will take me a while, but will post some.

[Viv]

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not seen
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.

Then; in my childhood; in the dawn
Of a most stormy life; was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still;
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that ‘round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view

Edgar Allan Poe

[Viv]

Always post this one, just love it:

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
All I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip's over.

[Viv]

What is this life if full of care

We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep, or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this, if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.



William Henry Davies 1871 - 1940

[donquixote99]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening


Whose woods these are I thnk I know
His house in is the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Chookie]

What are your favourite poets??

Here are some of mine:-

Hamish Henderson
Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald)
Anna Akhmotova
Jose Marti
W B Yeats
Alfred Tennyson
Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean)
Jose Luis Borges

And here's Hendersons' masterpiece:-

The Freedom Come a' Ye

Roch the wind in the clear days dawin'
Blaws the cloods heelster gowdy ow'r the bay
But there's mair nor a roch wind blawin'
Through the great glen o' the warld the day.
It's a thocht that will gar oor rottans
A' they rogues that gang gallus fresh and gay
Tak the road an' seek ither loanins
For their ill ploys tae sport an' play
Nae mair will the bonnie callants

Mairch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw,
Nor wee weans frae pit-heid an' clachan
Mourn the ships sailing doon the Broomielaw.
Broken families in lands we've herriet
Will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair.
Black and white, ane til ither mairriet
Mak' the vile barracks o' their masters bare.

So come all ye at hame wi' freedom
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom
In your hoose a' the bairns o' Adam
Can find breid, barley bree an' painted room.
When MacLean meets wi's freens in Springburn
A' the roses an' geans will turn tae bloom
And a black boy frae yont Nyanga
Dings the fell gallows o' the burghers doon.

[Chookie]

OK. Here's one of mine which sorta ties with Vivs' post about Rosslyn Chapel.........

Colombus didn't

The folk of Europe, those of the North
Across the seas for fame went forth
From Ireland, from Iceland, from Norroway
From Sweden, Scotland, Denmark too,
The Viking, the Saint, the Explorer,
They sailed to the South, the North and the West
They found it, explored it, and left it to rest.

The Vikings named Greenland
And from there found Vinland.
Saint Brendan sailed over
And called men to Christ.
Then many years later
Men came from the North
In ships that had sailed out of the Forth.

Prince Henry Sinclair was his name
Of Orkney, Earl, of courtly fame.
With him sailed Irish, Scots and Norse
And men who’d fought the English Wars.
They took their way across the sea
Till came they onto that far land
And laid their ships upon the strand.

Why those who found it went away,
The truth no one can tell today.
After them came men of Spain,
The English too did sail the seas
To steal whatever they could steal.
Why did the finders give it no name?
They really did not want the blame!

Columbus sailed in ‘ninety-two
The Chinese passage to pursue.
To reach the East was his intent
So aimed he for the setting sun!
Upon a tropic isle he landed
Its natives lives did he vandalise
And sail back to Spain dragging his prize.

They call it a lie, this story I’ve told,
“it’s a lie, it’s untrue, you liar so bold
Why did you this? Have no shame?
To lie of America, of how it was found?
On you shall fall oaths and curses as well
You are now damned to worst pit of Hell.
When the weight of our fears fall hard on the Earth.”

[An Céachta Dearg]

Michael Scanlan


When I was a maiden fair and young,
On the pleasant banks of Lee,
No bird that in the greenwood sung,
Was half so blithe and free.
My heart ne'er beat with flying feet,
No love sang me his queen,
Till down the glen rode Sarsfield's men,
And they wore the jackets green.

Young Donal sat on his gallant grey
Like a king on a royal seat,
And my heart leaped out on his regal way
To worship at his feet.
O Love, had you come in those colours dressed,
And wooed with a soldier's mein
I'd have laid my head on your throbbing breast
For the sake of your jacket green.

No hoarded wealth did my love own,
Save the good sword that he bore;
But I loved him for himself alone
And the colour bright he wore.
For had he come in England's red
To make me England's queen,
I'd rove the high green hills instead
For the sake of the Irish green.

When William stormed with shot and shell
At the walls of Garryowen,
In the breach of death my Donal fell,
And he sleeps near the Treaty Stone.
That breach the foeman never crossed
While he swung his broadsword keen;
But I do not weep my darling lost,
For he fell in his jacket green.

When Sarsfield sailed away I wept
As I heard the wild ochone.
I felt, then dead as the men who slept
'Neath the fields of Garryowen.
White Ireland held my Donal blessed,
No wild sea rolled between,
Till I would fold him to my breast
All robed in his Irish green.

My soul has sobbed like waves of woe,
That sad o'er tombstones break,
For I buried my heart in his grave below,
For his and for Ireland's sake.
And I cry. "Make way for the soldier's bride
In your halls of death, sad queen
For I long to rest by my true love's side
And wrapped in the folds of green."

I saw the Shannon's purple tide
Roll by the Irish town,
As I stood in the breach by Donal's side
When England's flag went down.
And now it lowers when I seek the skies,
Like a blood red curse between.
I weep, but 'tis not women's sighs
Will raise our Irish green.

Oh, Ireland, said is thy lonely soul,
And loud beats the winter sea,
But sadder and higher the wild waves roll
O'er the hearts that break for thee.
Yet grief shall come to our heartless foes,
And their thrones in the dust be seen,
So, Irish Maids, love none but those
Who wear the jackets green.

[bay]

What if

What if you slept ?
And what if,
In your sleep
You dreamed ?

And what if,
In your dream,
You went to heaven
And there plucked
A strange and
Beautiful flower ?

And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower in your hand ?

Aha, What then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[donquixote99]

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.


Wislawa Szymborska

[Viv]

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence
by James Elroy Flecker

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

[Viv]

Quiero que sepas
una cosa.

Tú sabes cómo es esto:
si miro
la luna de cristal, la rama roja
del lento otoño en mi ventana,
si toco
junto al fuego
la impalpable ceniza
o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña,
todo me lleva a ti,
como si todo lo que existe:
aromas, luz, metales,
fueran pequeños barcos que navegan
hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.

Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.

Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en esa día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.

Pero
si cada día,
cada hora,
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable,
si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.


"If You Forget Me"
By Pablo Neruda
In English:

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists:
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loveing me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

[An Céachta Dearg]

Only Our Rivers Run Free

Michael McConnell

When apples still grow in November
When Blossoms still bloom from each tree
When leaves are still green in December
It's then that our land will be free
I wander her hills and her valleys
And still through my sorrow I see
A land that has never known freedom
And only her rivers run free

I drink to the death of her manhood
Those men who'd rather have died
Than to live in the cold chains of bondage
To bring back their rights were denied
Oh where are you now when we need you
What burns where the flame used to be
Are ye gone like the snows of last winter
And will only our rivers run free?

How sweet is life but we're crying
How mellow the wine but it's dry
How fragrant the rose but it's dying
How gentle the breeze but it sighs
What good is in youth when it's aging
What joy is in eyes that can't see
When there's sorrow in sunshine and flowers
And still only our rivers run free

[bay]

Vi and Red, these are beautiful, thanks.

[Viv]

What if

What if you slept ?
And what if,
In your sleep
You dreamed ?

And what if,
In your dream,
You went to heaven
And there plucked
A strange and
Beautiful flower ?

And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower in your hand ?

Aha, What then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No, this is beautiful.

I also like Don Quixotes' Frost one, on the snow-laden forest. It's so descriptive, you feel you are there.

[quirk]

To Woman by Lord Byron

Woman! experience might have told me
That all must love thee, who behold thee:
Surely experience might have taught
Thy firmest promises are nought;
But, plac'd in all thy charms before me,
All I forget, but to _adore_ thee.
Oh memory! thou choicest blessing,
When join'd with hope, when still possessing;
But how much curst by every lover
When hope is fled, and passion's over.
Woman, that fair and fond deceiver,
How prompt are striplings to believe her!
How throbs the pulse, when first we view
The eye that rolls in glossy blue,
Or sparkles black, or mildly throws
A beam from under hazel brows!
How quick we credit every oath,
And hear her plight the willing troth!
Fondly we hope 'twill last for ay,
When, lo! she changes in a day.
This record will for ever stand,'
"Woman, thy vows are trac'd in sand."

[quirk]

Darkness by Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

[Chookie]

The Great Silkie (Traditional)

An earthly nourris sits and sings
And aye she sings “Ba li li , wean,
I dinnae ken your fathers name
Nor yet the land that he staps in.”

Then in stapped he til her bed-fit,
And a grumlie guest, I’m sure was he,
Says “Here I am, thy bairnies father,
Although I be not comlie.”

“I am a man upon the land,
And I am a silkie in the sea,
And when I’m far and far frae land,
My hame it is the Sule Skerry.”

He gave to her a pouch o gold, saying
“Tak ye up your nourris fee,
and gie to me my little young son,
that I may teach him to swim the faem”

“And ye shall marry a good gunner
And a gunner good, I’m sure he’ll be
And the very first shot, your gunner shoots
he’ll kill baith your young son and me.”

[Viv]

To Woman by Lord Byron

Woman! experience might have told me
That all must love thee, who behold thee:
Surely experience might have taught
Thy firmest promises are nought;
But, plac'd in all thy charms before me,
All I forget, but to _adore_ thee.
Oh memory! thou choicest blessing,
When join'd with hope, when still possessing;
But how much curst by every lover
When hope is fled, and passion's over.
Woman, that fair and fond deceiver,
How prompt are striplings to believe her!
How throbs the pulse, when first we view
The eye that rolls in glossy blue,
Or sparkles black, or mildly throws
A beam from under hazel brows!
How quick we credit every oath,
And hear her plight the willing troth!
Fondly we hope 'twill last for ay,
When, lo! she changes in a day.
This record will for ever stand,'
"Woman, thy vows are trac'd in sand."

THAT is too close to the truth for comfort in many ways....:o

[quirk]

This is probably one of my all time favourite poems:



I Wandered Lonley As A Cloud
-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 waves 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.

[An Céachta Dearg]

I know its a song but I love the lyrics of this one

Really shows the talent of Pete Doherty and Carl Barat

Cant Stand Me Now



An ending fitting for the start
You twist and tore our love apart
Your light fingers threw the dart
Shattered the lamp into darkness it cast us...

No, you've got it the wrong way round
Just shocked me up and blamed it on the brown
Cornered the boy kicked out at the world,
The world kicked back a lot fuckin' harder...

If you wanna try, If you wanna try
There's no worse you could do (oh oh oh)
I know you lie, I know you lie
I'm just so in love with you (oh oh oh)

Can't take me anywhere (I'll take you anywhere)
You can't take me anywhere (I can't take you anywhere)
I'll take you anywhere you wanna go!

Oh, you can't stand me now (No, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now (Oh, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now (No, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now,
You can't stand me now!

Have we enough to keep it together?
Or do we just keep on pretending
And hope our luck is never ending
You tried to pull the wool, I wasn't feeling too clever
And you take all that they're lending
Until you needed mending...

If you wanna try, If you wanna try
there's no worse you could do (oh oh oh)
I know you lie, all you do is make me cry
And all these words they aint true (oh oh)

I can't take me anywhere (I can't take you anywhere)
You can't take me anywhere (I'll take you anywhere)
I'll take you anywhere you wanna go!

Oh, you can't stand me now (No, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now (Oh, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now (No, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now (No, you can't stand me now)
You can't stand me now!
You can't stand me now!
You can't stand me now!
No, you can't stand me now!
You can't stand me now!
You can't stand me now!
No, you can't stand me now!

[Chookie]

The Heroes Return (by Eric Bogle)

My youngest son came home today,
His friends marched with him all the way,
The flutes and drums beat out the time,
As in his box of polished pine,
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son was a fine young man,
With a wife, a daughter and two sons,
A man he would have lived and died,
Till by a bullet sanctified.
Now he’s a saint, or so they say,
They brought their Saint home today.

Above the bombed and battered streets,
The lowering sky looks down and weeps,
On children’s blood in gutters spilled,
In dreams of Freedom unfulfilled,
As part of freedom’s price to pay,
My youngest son came home today.

My youngest son came home today,
His friends marched with him all the way,
The flutes and drums beat out the time,
As in his box of polished pine,
Like dead meat on a butcher’s tray
My youngest son came home today.

[bay]

can you guys find anything sadder to post?? gees, bay needs a hankie now.

[Phædrus]

can you guys find anything sadder to post?? gees, bay needs a hankie now.

How about something satirical?

I went out to take a friggin' walk by the friggin' reservoir,
a-wishin' for a friggin' quid to pay my friggin' score,
my head it was a-achin' and my throat was parched and dry,
and so I sent a little prayer, a-wingin' to the sky...

And there came a friggin' falcon and he walked upon the waves,
and I said, "A friggin' miracle!" and sang a couple staves,
of a friggin' churchy ballad I learned when I was young.
The friggin' bird took to the air, and spattered me with dung.

I fell upon my friggin' knees and bowed my friggin' head,
and said three friggin' Aves for all my friggin' dead,
and then I got upon my feet and said another ten.
The friggin' bird burst into flame - and spattered me again.

The burnin' bird hung in the sky just like a friggin' sun.
It seared my friggin' eyelids shut, and when the job was done,
the friggin' bird flashed cross the sky just like a shootin' star.
I ran to tell the friggin' priest - he bummed my last cigar.

I told him of the miracle, he told me of the Rose,
I showed him bird crap in my hair, the bastard held his nose.
I went to see the bishop but the friggin' bishop said,
"Go home and sleep it off, you sod - and wash your friggin' head!"

Then I came upon a friggin' wake for a friggin' rotten swine,
by the name of Jock O'Leary and I touched his head with mine,
and old Jock sat up in his box and raised his friggin' head.
His wife took out a forty-four, and shot the bastard dead.

Again I touched his head with mine and brought him back to life.
His smiling face rolled on the floor, this time she used a knife.
And then she fell upon her knees, and started in to pray,
"It's forty years, O Lord," she said, "I've waited for this day."

So I walked the friggin' city 'mongst the friggin' halt and lame,
and every time I raised them up, they got knocked down again,
'cause the love of God comes down to man in a friggin' curious way,
but when a man is marked for love, that love is here to stay.

And this I know because I've got a friggin' curious sign;
for every time I wash my head, the water turns to wine!
And I gives it free to workin' blokes to brighten up their lives,
so they don't kick no dogs around, nor beat up on their wives.

'Cause there ain't no use to miracles like walkin' on the sea;
They crucified the Son of God, but they don't muck with me!
'Cause I leave the friggin' blind alone, the dyin' and the dead,
but every day at four o'clock, I wash my friggin' head!

- The Friggin' Falcon, by Theodore R. Cogswell

[quirk]

We Only Want the Earth
by James Connolly



Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene'er they speak
That we demand too much.
'Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

"Be moderate," the trimmers cry,
Who dread the tyrants' thunder.
"You ask too much and people By
From you aghast in wonder."
'Tis passing strange, for I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.

Our masters all a godly crew,
Whose hearts throb for the poor,
Their sympathies assure us, too,
If our demands were fewer.
Most generous souls! But please observe,
What they enjoy from birth
Is all we ever had the nerve
To ask, that is, the earth.

The "labour fakir" full of guile,
Base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we'll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
To realize its own, the earth.

For labour long, with sighs and tears,
To its oppressors knelt.
But never yet, to aught save fears,
Did the heart of tyrant melt.
We need not kneel, our cause no dearth
Of loyal soldiers' needs
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be we want the earth!

[Chookie]

can you guys find anything sadder to post?? gees, bay needs a hankie now.

OK, try this one on for size......................

Said Hongray de la Glaciere unto his proud Papa:
"I want to take a wife mon Père," The Marquis laughed: "Ha! Ha!
And whose, my son?" he slyly said; but Hongray with a frown
Cried, "Fi! Papa, I mean - to wed, I want to settle down."
The Marquis de la Glaciere responded with a smile;
"You're young my boy; I much prefer that you should wait awhile."
But Hongray sighed: "I cannot wait, for I am twenty-four;
And I have met my blessed fate: I worship and adore.
Such beauty, grace and charm has she, I'm sure you will approve,
For if I live a century none other can I love."
"I have no doubt," the Marquis shrugged, "that she's a proper pet;
But has she got a decent dot, and is she of our set?"
"Her dot," said Hongray, "will suffice; her family you know.
The girl with whom I fain would splice is Mirabelle du Veau."

What made the Marquis start and stare, and clutch his perfumed beard?
Why did he stagger to a chair and murmur: "As I feared?"
Dilated were his eyes with dread, and in a voice of woe
He wailed: "My son, you cannot wed with Mirabelle du Veau."
"Why not? my Parent," Hongray cried. "Her name's without a slur.
Why should you look so horrified that I should wed with her?"
The Marquis groaned: "Unhappy lad! Forget her if you can,
And see in your respected Dad a miserable man."
"What id the matter? I repeat," said Hongray growing hot.
"She's witty, pretty, rich and sweet... Then- mille diables!- what?"
The Marquis moaned: "Alas! that I your dreams of bliss should banish;
It happened in the days gone-by, when I was Don Juanish.
Her mother was your mother's friend, and we were much together.
Ah well! You know how such things end. (I blame it on the weather.)
We had a very sultry spell. One day, mon Dieu! I kissed her.
My son, you can't wed Mirabelle. She is... she is your sister."

So broken-hearted Hongray went and roamed the world around,
Till hunting in the Occident forgetfulness he found.
Then quite recovered, he returned to the paternal nest,
Until one day, with brow that burned, the Marquis he addresses:
"Felicitate me, Father mine; my brain is in a whirl;
For I have found the mate divine, the one, the perfect girl.
She's healthy, wealthy, witching, wise, with loveliness serene.
And Proud am I to win a prize, half angel and half queen."
"'Tis time to wed," the Marquis said, "You must be twenty-seven.
But who is she whose lot may be to make your life a heaven?"
"A friend of childhood," Hongray cried. "For whom regard you feel.
The maid I fain would be my bride is Raymonde de la Veal."

The Marquis de la Glaciere collapsed upon the floor,
And all the words he uttered were: "Forgive me, I implore.
My sins are heavy on my head. Profound remorse I feel.
My son, you simply cannot wed with Raymonde de la Veal."
Then Hongray spoke voice that broke, and corrugated brow:
"Inform me, Sir, why you demur. What is the matter now?"
The Marquis wailed: "My wicked youth! Ah! how it gives me pain.
But let me tell the awful truth, my agony explain...
A cursed Casanova I; a finished flirt her mother;
And so alas! it came to pass we fell for one another:
Our lives were blent in bliss and joy, The sequel you may gather:
You cannot wed Raymonde, my boy, because I am...her father."

Again sore-stricken Hongray fled, and sought his grief to smother,
And as he writhed upon his bed to him there came his Mother.
The Marquise de la Glaciere was snowy-haired and frigid.
Her wintry featured chiselled were, her manner stiff and rigid.
The pride of race was in her face, her bearing high and stately,
And sinking down by Hongray's side she spoke to him sedately:
"What ails you so, my precious child? What throngs of sorrow smite you?
Why are your eyes so wet and wild? Come tell me, I invite you."
"Ah! if I told you, Mother dear," said Hongray with a shiver,
"Another's honour would, I fear, be in the soup forever."
"Nay trust," she begged, "My only boy, the fond Mama who bore you.
Perhaps I may, your grief alloy. Please tell me, I implore you."

And so his story Hngray told, in accents choked and muffled.
The Marquise listened calm and cold, her visage quite unruffled.
He told of Mirabelle du Veau, his agony revealing.
For Raymonde de la Veal his woe was quite beyond concealing.
And still she sat without a word, her look so high and haughty,
You'd ne'er have thought it was her lord who had behaved so naughty.
Then Hongray finished up: "For life my hopes are doomed to slaughter;
For if I choose another wife, she's sure to be his daughter."
The Marquise rose. "Cheer up," said she, "the last word is not spoken.
A Mother cannot sit and see her boy's heart rudely broken.
So dry your tears and calm your fears; no longer need you tarry;
To-day your bride you may decide, to-morrow you may marry.
Yes, you may wed with Mirabelle, or Raymonde if you'd rather...
For I as well the truth may tell...Papa is not your father."



Madam La Marquise (by Robert W Service)

[Viv]

Lol....haven't read that one before, Chookie...:)

[Viv]

can you guys find anything sadder to post?? gees, bay needs a hankie now.

Men seem to be obssessed with death and destruction and fighting hopeless fights...

[Chookie]

Lol....haven't read that one before, Chookie...:)

The same bloke wrote Eskimo Nell.

[donquixote99]

Oh, we're on death poems now?



All who love will lose and mourn,
In this mortal field we tramp,
Death awaits all that are born.

Cold wind rustles through the corn,
Flick'ring, dwindling, failing lamp,
All who love will lose and mourn.

Faint heard call of distant horn,
Chilled by more than cold and damp,
Death awaits all that are born.

Raveled clothes no longer worn,
Desert, cold and empty camp,
All who love will lose and mourn.

Insubstantial bonds are torn,
Ended fleshly pang and cramp;
All who love will lose and mourn,
Death awaits all that are born.

[Murgi]

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche

I can write the saddest verses tonight


By: Pablo Neruda



Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Escribir, por ejemplo : 'La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos'.
El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.
En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.
Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.
Oir la noche immensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.
Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.
Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.
La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos arboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.
De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto al amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Aunque ésta sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.






Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes?
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost
her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without
her,
And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
That night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the
distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that is certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes,
I no longer love her, that is certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my
arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer,
and these the last verses that I write for her.

[Murgi]

Sonnet CLXVI Luis de Góngora y Argote



Mientras por competir con tu cabello,
oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano;
mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello;

Mientras a cada labio, por cogello.
siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano;
y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello:

Goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,

No sólo en plata o víola troncada
se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente
en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra,
en nada.

While trying with your tresses to compete
in vain the sun's rays shine on burnished gold;
while with abundant scorn across the plain
does your white brow the lily's hue behold;

While to each of your lips, to catch and keep,
are drawn more eyes than to carnations bright;
and while with graceful scorn your lovely throat
transparently still bests all crystal's light,

Take your delight in throat, locks, lips, and brow,
before what in your golden years was gold,
carnation, lily, crystal luminous,

Not just to silver or limp violets
will turn, but you and all of it as well
to earth, decay, dust, gloom, and
nothingness.

[/LEFT]

[bay]

can we get back to war ahd mayhem? bay just can't deal with sad love poems right now!

[bay]

Bono wrote this for his father, but it fits so many relationships....

Sometimes You can't Make It on your Own


Tough, you think you’ve got the stuff
You’re telling me and anyone
You’re hard enough
You don’t have to put up a fight
You don’t have to always be right
Let me take some of the punches
For you tonight

Listen to me now
I need to let you know
You don’t have to go it alone

And it’s you when I look in the mirror
And it’s you when I don’t pick up the phone
Sometimes you can’t make it on your own

We fight all the time
You and I, that’s alright
We’re the same soul
I don’t need, I don’t need to hear you say
That if we weren’t so alike
You’d like me a whole lot more

Listen to me now
I need to let you know
You don’t have to go it alone

And it’s you when I look in the mirror
And it’s you when I don’t pick up the phone
Sometimes you can’t make it on your own

I know that we don’t talk
I'm sick of it all
Can you hear me when I sing
You’re the reason I sing
You’re the reason why the opera is in me
Well, hey now
Still got to let you know
A house doesn’t make a home
Don’t leave me here alone

And it’s you when I look in the mirror
And it’s you that makes it hard to let go
Sometimes you can’t make it on your own
Sometimes you can’t make it
Best you can do is to fake it
Sometimes you can’t make it on your own

[Phædrus]

“!!!”

It comes at night, a shout, a yell
A cry, or laugh, perhaps a wail
Or perhaps it’s just a tolling bell
Or the slamming bars in jail
It cuts the air, it cuts the night
‘Cross untold miles, it comes to me
With shattering, angry, clamorous might
It leaves me with a mystery

Is it lovers, in the park
Enfolded in each other’s arms?
Brief romance that, just like a lark
Flees them, leaves them with alarm?
Or is it more enduring, loving,
A light that glows in every heart
As souls, with happiness and caring
Do join—and never part

Or is it a cry of shock, of pain
Splashing blood—a gleaming knife—
Life extinguished, a man lay slain
For naught but some unreasoned strife
A killer, murderer, soaked in blood
Returns to home to lie in bed
His deed is done, for ill or good
Which broken man is dead?

A worker, to his labors tending
The endless work to earn his pay
On on on, never ending
What thoughts in his head lay?
Or the politician, boasting
Of his deeds of days gone by
Lying, cheating, stealing, dealing
Who cares what his head hides?

A peddler calling, from his stall
Greeting strangers as he would a friend
Look here, look there, I have it all
His gleeful chatter, without end
But underneath the mask he wears
His heart is cold and hard as stone
For to lie and cheat to sell his wares
He must be all alone

Vain preachers at their pulpits, yelling
With fanatic, ecstatic, frenetic glee
Each one pushing, pimping, selling
His favored brand of immortality
The prideful flock comes eager, bidden
By the cold, lonely, relentless bell
If these be what reside in Heaven
I’d rather be in Hell

Then it’s gone, the question with it
Passing, dimming, there it goes
What was the answer that it hid?
Lovers, friends, or foes?


- Me

[Chookie]

Mary had a little lamb
it ran into a pylon
10,000 volts went up its' arse
and turned its' wool to nylon.

[bay]

oh chookie, there's always one who spoils the mood, LOL.

[bay]

SOAR - by anonymous (not really anon, so don't steal it)

Today I have
The wisdom of Athena in my heart
The heartbeat of Demeter in my hands
And the power of Zeus in my blood.

Let go and trust said the red tailed hawk
I will fly you to Mount Olympus
Journeys with great rewards are never easy,
Always perilous
Ecstasy does not come without tears
Victory does not come without defeat.

Awaken. The heartbeat of Gaia, the earth
Is in the soil, rocks and trees
It is part of you, nourishes your soul
Heals you.
Rainbows do not come without storms.
Unity does not come without strife.

Remember, the hawk said, what is in you.
The power of Zeus and all the Olympians
Thunder and lightning pave the way.
Fly to the top.
Flight does not come without risk.
Life does not come without love.

[Viv]

oh chookie, there's always one who spoils the mood, LOL.

In my experience, Chookie is always the one...:p

[bay]

I didn't have a valentine this year to write a love poem to, so I wrote one to a being who has been my friend and companion for 11 years and 1,500 miles

For Starman

Clip clop, clip clop
Tick tock, tick tock
His hoofbeats match
My heartbeat
Up and down
In rhythm I move
As he presses on
Forward, forward, forward

The two-tracks are easy
Until a deer steps out
Or a leaf blows, then
We skid stop, wheel
And turn, my legs
Clutching his sides
Trying to stay on

Breathe Bay breathe
Trot Star Trot
We go again,
Wind in our faces
Looking for the
Next ribbon that tells us
TURN HERE NOW

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/5766/indiancaves1rk3.jpg

Cool morning mist
Gives way to sun
The hills come at us
One by one
Steeper, higher, harder
Steel shoes scramble
Over rocks sent flying
Down the ravine

We dodge tree limbs
And spider webs
Turning right, turning left
Trotting the “s” curves
Up, down, around, over
And through
The trail goes on
It never ends.


Water. A muddy pond
Green grass. We stop
We rest. He eats, he drinks
I catch my breath
Drink my water
Pour over my head
It’s hot, it’s hot
Pour down my front
And down my back


Sponge on a string
I aim for the water
Sponge sinks, pull it up
Squeezing coolness
Over his neck.
Water and sweat
Mix and roll off
Horse hair glistens

Break is over, time to go
Here’s a meadow
Feel good now
Mom, can we gallop?
YES, let’s go for it
Tears in my eyes as
Four beats fly
Scenery a blur

All too soon, back to woods
Skid to a stop
Three ribbons tell us
Turn right here
Trotting on, twisting
Turning.
Here’s rocks, here’s logs
Up, over, around and through
Onward, onward



Ears perk up, pace picks up
Now I hear too
Horses neighing
Voices laughing
Almost there! Camp ahead!
Number please, timer says
Thirty one, I shout
Feet hit ground

Legs wobbly, knees hurting
Loosen the girth, let him breathe
Take his heart rate
We’re down! I yell
Pulse taker nods
Next to vet, trot out please
My legs like rubber
Jogging along as
Hooves skim the dirt
Tail high, eyes bright
Looking good, vet says
Horse, not you.

Time for rest, eat and drink
Then tack up and go again
31, you’re out!
Sun beats on us now
Air gets thicker
Sweat gets stickier
Trotting, trotting, trotting
Endless trail goes on and on

Turn here, turn there
Up and down, over and around
Crossing streams,
Climbing hills
Cantering meadows
Can we finish?
I feel sick, I feel tired
My faith wavers.

http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/207/starcammay22cuq7.jpg

Star says just hang on
I’ll get us there
My breaths come
In time with his
Strong legs, Sure feet
Eat up miles
Step by step, stride by stride
Then I see it
A little sign
“Camp 2 miles”

I look at watch
We’re on time!
It’s ok, we can do this!
Heart feels lighter
I smile again
His steps get quicker
He knows, he knows
Almost there and
Job is done

Star says, told you so,
Have faith in me
I’ll get us there
How many miles
Have I seen, Starman
Through your ears?
Your great heart
Your great legs
Your great spirit
Forever my friend.

http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/8976/starmanmay10bcq2.jpg

[greektzon]

The Sheppard-Whittle Case: Peter Zenger Redux
by John Bryant

I Am a Spirit

I am a spirit, truly free, and speaking as I ken;
I take the name of Peter Zenger, Lenny Bruce
and many lesser men;
The Keepers and the Patriarchs have silenced me
As one for sure insane;
I have been silenced, yes, but do not fear,
For I shall speak again! -

[bay]

nice, thanks greektzon

[quirk]

The following was wrote by someone who was in the World Trade Centre when it was hit.

Why were the towers brought down that day?

What have I done that day?

What soul did I lay my hands upon?

What soul did I anger?

Am I the focus of this attack,

Or is it my Government?

Surely, I do not remember committing any major crime,

But I can point out a million and one crimes

Of my Government.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were punished

For the actions of their Government;

Could this be our turn for punishment?

If so, I accept the punishment,

Because we deserve it…

My Government killed over 1 million Iraqi’s

With their Depleted Uranium,

They killed dozens of innocents

In Operation Infinite Reach,

They give financial and military aid to Israel,

Who have killed thousands of innocent Palestinians,

And who shamelessly slaughtered the innocents in Qana,

They support the tyrants in the Muslim lands,

And they have infiltrated Muslim lands by establishing their bases.

So could it be that the Muslims are waking up after their slumber?

Could it be that the Muslims are realizing how dishonored they have become,

Thus, leading them to punishing the head of this snake:

My Government?

I can only bury my head in my hands in shame.

[bay]

thank you quirk.

[bay]

YOU SEND ME SONGS

You send me songs that say I love you
And then push me away.
A guerilla lover
You pull me in
Lob promises at me
Then vanish.

[bay]

She Could Hear Them


She could hear them, the voices, my yiayia
She could hear
The mountains
The sea
The ancestors
From the Pantheon at Olympus to Jesus and Mary.
Genetic memory soundbites
Code passed on from Mother Earth to mothers of the world.
Things only a woman can know. Things only a woman cares to know.
Events that would come, people who would go, worlds that would collide.
A brother’s death
A husband’s wrath
A child’s birth.
A grandchild’s pain.
But she could not tell about omens carried in the wind,.
Things you keep in your soul
Sharing her secrets with the Madonna icon late at night.

[bay]

WILD IRISH PRINCESS OF THE SEA
By bay

While other girls played with dolls
And dreamed of dresses and courts and princes and kings
You, our wild Irish princess dreamed of the sea.
Of far away lands, of battles and riches, of plunders and
Glory.
Many tried to tame you—a husband, the Turks, the English.
But you were not their prize.

You, dark lady of Doona, pillaged merchant ships
Conquered enemy castles, slayed dragons, bested kings
You slipped English sea nets like a quicksilver fish.
Strong and haughty, yet a pirate for the people and land she
Loved.
Your courage and cunning opened the Howth Castle gates
Forever.

A pirate, a princess, a thorn in the side of the monarchy,
A rebel, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a mistress, a legend
In poetry and song and books and stories
“Mise Eire” your spirit proclaims. Indeed sea queen
You are.
Grace by name, Eire by heart, storm by sea and land
Óró 'Sé do bheatha 'bhaile

[quirk]

Excellent poem Bay. I didn't know you wrote any. If you have more then stick it up.

[bay]

thanks quirk, all three of those are mine. I'll put up some more later, don't wanna hog the poetry thread!

[quirk]

One of my favourites:

Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats

MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80

[bay]

do poetic song lyrics count???

Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez

I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

[bay]

North Girl

by bay

Leaves swirl in a storm
Around my feet
Wind chilling my hands
Voices I hear -- go back go back
Come here come here

Do I have the strength
Enough for this?