Share A Poet

[RhymeFairy]

Her Voice


THE wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily-cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,

Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,--
It shall be, I said, for eternity
'Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done,
Love's web is spun.

Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.

Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,--
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.

Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.

And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,--you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you.


~~ Oscar Wilde

 

[TheRainMan]

Wild Geese Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

[another realm]

The Rules of Evidence
Lee Robinson

What you want to say most
is inadmissible.
Say it anyway.
Say it again.
What they tell you is irrelevant
can’t be denied and will
eventually be heard.
Every question
is a leading question.
Ask it anyway, then expect
what you won’t get.
There is no such thing
as the original
so you’ll have to make do
with a reasonable facsimile.
The history of the world
is hearsay. Hear it.
The whole truth
is unspeakable
and nothing but the truth
is a lie.
I swear this.
My oath is a kiss.
I swear
by everything
incredible.

 

[sugarmountain]

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women;
Twin ironies by which great saints are made,
The agonizing pincer-jaws of heaven

Patrick Kavanagh

 

[lindiana]

To Earthward
by Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of - was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

 

[clutching_calliope]

Pursuit - Sylvia Plath

.....

 

[sugarmountain]

Lullaby

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

W.H. Auden

 

[another realm]

A New Poet
Linda Pastan

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don't see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day -- the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

 

[MyNecroticSnail]

Honte

Honte - Arthur Rimbaud

Tant que la lame n'aura
Pas coupé cette cervelle,
Ce paquet blanc, vert et gras,
A vapeur jamais nouvelle,
(Ah ! Lui, devrait couper son
Nez, sa lèvre, ses oreilles,
Son ventre! et faire abandon
De ses jambes ! ô merveille !)

Mais non, vrai, je crois que tant
Que pour sa tête la lame,
Que les cailloux pour son flanc,
Que pour ses boyaux la flamme

N'auront pas agi, l'enfant
Gêneur, la si sotte bête,
Ne doit cesser un instant
De ruser et d'être traître

Comme un chat des Monts-Rocheux ;
D'empuantir toutes sphères !
Qu'à sa mort pourtant, ô mon Dieu !
S'élève quelque prière !

 

[My Erotic Trail]

Holes in the floor of heaven


One day SHY OF eight years old
Grandma passed away
I was a broken hearted little boy,
blowing out that birthday cake

How I cried when the sky let go
with a cold and lonesome rain
Momma smiled said don't be sad child
Grandma's watchin you today

'Cause there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and her tears are pourin' down
that's how you know she's watchin'
wishin' she could be here now
And sometimes if you're lonely
just remember she can see
there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and she's watchin' over you and me

Seasons come and seasons go
nothin' stays the same
I grew up fell in love
met a girl who took my name

Year by year we made a life
in this sleepy little town
I thought we'd grow old together
Lord I sure do miss her now

But there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and her tears are pourin' down
that's how you know she's watchin'
wishin' she could be here now
and sometimes when I'm lonely
I remember she can see
there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and she's watchin' over you and me

Well my little girl is 23
I walk her down the aisle
it's a shame her mom can't be here now
to see her lovely smile

They throw the rice
I catch her eye
as the rain starts comin' down
she takes my hand says daddy don't be sad 'cause
I know momma's watchin' now

And there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and her tears are pourin down
that's how you know she's watchin'
wishin' she could be here now
and sometimes when I'm lonely
I remember she can see
there's holes in the floor of Heaven
and she's watchin' over you and me

Watchin' over you and me
Watchin' over you and me
Watchin' over you and me

 

[RhymeFairy]

Forgetfulness


The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.


~~ Billy Collins

 

[MsBug]

Wu Tsao

For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin
Wu Tsao (19th century)
translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung

On your slender body
Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
Like those of a celestial companion
Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
One smile from you when we meet,
And I become speechless and forget every word.
For too long you have gathered flowers,
And leaned against the bamboos,
Your green sleeves growing cold,
In your deserted valley:
I can visualize you all alone,
A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.

You glow like a perfumed lamp
In the gathering shadows.
We play wine games
And recite each other's poems.
Then you sing, "Remembering South of the River"
With its heartbreaking verses. Then
We paint each other's beautiful eyebrows,
I want to possess you completely-
Your jade body
And your promised heart.
It is spring.
Vast mists cover the Five Lakes.
My dear, let me buy a red painted boat
And carry you away.

 

[MsBug]

Elsa Gidlow

Love's Acolyte
Elsa Gidlow

Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you till the moon went out;
Many have brought you lover's gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.

But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a wordless prayer.

The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you,
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.

 

[vampiredust]

Adolescence by W.H.Auden

By landscape reminded once of his mother's figure
The mountain heights he remembers get bigger and bigger:
With all the finest of mapping pens he fondly traces
All the family names on the familiar places.

In a green pasture straying, he walks by still waters;
Surely a swan he seems to earth's unwise daughters,
Bending a beautiful head, worshipping not lying,
"Dear " the dear beak in the concha crying.

Under the trees the summer bands were playing;
"Dear boy, be brave to these roots," he heard them saying:
Carries the good news gladly to a world in danger,
Is ready to argue, he smiles, with any stranger.

And yet this prophet, homing the day is ended,
Receives odd welcome from the country he so defended:
The band roars "Coward, Coward," in his human fever,
The giantess shuffles nearer, cries "Deceiver"

 

[cherries_on_snow]

I love Marge Piercy's poetry, particularly Memo to: in the same collection. I read a romance novel of hers that was a bit too bogged down with describing each character's consciences to develop pace.

TY for starting the thread, OP. Great idea.

The Moon Is Always Female
Marge Piercy

 

[cherries_on_snow]

AI's capture

From Fate[/] the poem "Capture" by AI

And that's how I found him,
hoeing weeds
in his garden.
He was shirtless,
his pants rolled below his navel.
I stopped and watched
as he swung the hoe down
to cut the head from a dark red flower.
He looked up then and smiled
and said, "It's like that with men."
He was not handsome;
his face was too flawed for that,
but somehow that made him beautiful,
with his thin hawk's nose over full lips
and the deep lines
that sliced his forehead.
His eyes gleamed
like two pale green chips of ice.
I said, "I'm a stranger here."
"You haven't seen our lake then,
shall I take you there?"he asked.
"When?"
"Now," he said, dropping the hoe.
He began to walk faster and faster
and I had to run to catch up to him.
There was no trail,
but he strode on through bushes that pricked me
and past low-hanging branches
that caught my skirt. Tore my skirt.
Then we were there.
"Lake, lake,"I cried, then laughed,
threw my head back
the way laborers and drunks do,
and roared, or tried to.
"It's a pond for children to wade in.
At home, at home we have a lake
you can swim in;
it takes a whole day to cross it."
He stood with his back to me;
he was oily with sweat
and he shone like some living metal.
He turned to me. "Swim.
Swim?" he said with a question mark.
"I haven't got a suit."
"Ha!"he said. "Ha,"
and rolled his pants up to his waist,
daring me,
then lowered them all the way down.
I covered my eyes, and when I looked
he was walking into the water.
"Modesty, that's your name," he said
over his shoulder.
"And yours?" I asked.
"I don't need a name.
I am what you see."
He laughed and slapped the water
with his long, thin hands.
Then he swam from one side to the other;
he floated on his back
and I watched him, of course I did
and when he was done,
he lay in the sun,
surrendered to the sun and my eyes.
"Do I pass now?"he asked
as he came to stand in front of me.
Then he asked, "Seen one lately?
It's a fine one,"he went on,
taking his cock in his hands.
"Touch it."
I shook my head.
"Get you,"he said and began to walk off,
but I grabbed his hard, smooth calves
and kissed them,
and with my tongue
licked my way down to his feet
and kissed each toe.
He sank down beside me,
took my face in his hands,
and lifted my head back.
Then he kissed me;
our tongues battered our teeth. Touched.
He raised my skirt with one hand,
pressed me back
and held me to the earth
with the weight of his body.
I bit his shoulder
as he pushed into me again. Again.
I kept my eyes open. He did too.
He stared and stared until he knew.
"You tricked me," he gasped
as he poured himself into my glass
and I drank him like grappa
made from grapes
I'd picked with my own hands.

 

[TheRainMan]

The Numbers
by Kim Addonizio

How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans,
with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish
a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted
in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know
how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times
the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again
in the course of an ordinary hour. I don’t know how God can bear
seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments
and burnings, the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts.
I want to close my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep
moving toward a fence. I want to count them, I want them to end.
I don’t want to wonder how many people are sitting in restaurants
about to close down, which of them will wander the sidewalks all night
while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days
are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say
one true thing about it—how often have I tried, how often
failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade
gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can’t help
asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks,
with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames
before covering the eyes. I’m tired, I want to rest now.
I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name
without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers
are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?

 

[cherries_on_snow]

Marianne Moore - The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron throught the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

 

[cherries_on_snow]

Love Is Not All

(sorry, just one more)

Love Is Not All

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

[TheRainMan]

Dickhead

by Tony Hoagland

To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked chicken
in a supermarket cooler, a poor

forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty, where wild
jockstraps flew across the steamy

skies of locker rooms,
and everybody fell down laughing
at jokes I didn’t understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that
beautiful ugliness always
cocked and loaded in my mind,
protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,
and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh

was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:

Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.

 

[cherries_on_snow]

It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself
It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

~Margaret Atwood

 

[cherries_on_snow]

Another Atwood

I Was Reading a Scientific Article

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light.

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colours, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

 

[vampiredust]

Beach Glass by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
ot touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

 

[MyNecroticSnail]

Dickhead

by Tony Hoagland

To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked chicken
in a supermarket cooler, a poor

forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty, where wild
jockstraps flew across the steamy

skies of locker rooms,
and everybody fell down laughing
at jokes I didn’t understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that
beautiful ugliness always
cocked and loaded in my mind,
protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,
and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh

was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:

Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.

ROFL,

"Piety"

Piety, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.

The pig is taught by sermons and epistles
To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.

Judibras. Better know as someone else, and for his short stories.

 

[sugarmountain]

The Heron

A servant's soul. He said I had a servant's soul
..... and he spat in the grate
and left me crying here like the wretch that I am.
So I thought then I should never touch him again
.....and I hated myself
and I sobbed for an hour alone in the cold room.
.....I'd had enough. I'd go.
Though the roads were crueller than he, I would walk home.
Then he knocked and came in with the bird in his hands.

He was red- with the heat of straw and horses on him.
But the anger was gone, and his face oddly still.
.....I was certain at last
I should never be quite alone; something of him
.....stuck with me, a splinter;
something he didn't want to give that reamined yet.
.....I said, It's a heron.
And he said, Yes, it was dead by the stable door
at the foot of the wall, in the snow, in the drain.

Its eye, he said, was deep as a fish's eye, its
.....wing's grey was my cloth dress.
And what kind of hope was left for us, when the bird
he had watched a week as it stalked the river's length
.....could be driven to this,
to a heap of frozen rag flung down from the roof,
with the rods of its legs furred white in ice, where the
.....horses breathed, where the pond
it had poached from in spring was snapped tight like a gin?

Stuart Henson