The thing about these poetry threads.....

Is that I kind of like 'em.... I say everybody post away with a favorite poem.



Emerald sails freely in the blue-green sea
While I lie awash in the wave’s foaming
crest. Lulling, basking, dreaming that Marx
does not matter. Was not raining in my ears.
Ahead there is illumination. Bright. Golden
Blinding. Flashing brilliant rainbows. Green.
Blue. Red. Yellow. Black. Each one shimmering
in thrall. “Liberation is a historical and not a
mental act” both she and Marx say. This makes
me long for freedom. Liberty from gorgeous
colors. From this wave’s flashing tidal pull.
Ebbing constantly. Continuously. Endlessly.
Etched, scorched into my mind. Sometimes I
believe turquoise is the color of Goddesses.

Sometimes I wish to be springtime holding
close the emerald beauty of this world.

For the Young Who Want To


Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

:)

Holy Thursday (Songs of Innocence)

'Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green:
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

===========
Holy Thursday (Songs of Experience)

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land, -
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns,
It is eternal winter there.

For where'er the sun does shine,
And where'er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appal.

:)

or am I the only one arrogant enough to do that? :)

:D

including... ok, especially me. :)

reading it. :P

I don't even acknowledge my first few years of work. Ugh! I have written books of the most godawful poetry known to man. Country song bad! I probably have.... a good six volumes or so back home. I averaged a little over a book a year for about 6 years, I think. The first 3 years should be condensed into a book titled:"Shit sandwich." :)

;)

person on earth too. Then I read real poetry and realized just how much I sucked. :)

Every Day You Play
By Pablo Neruda

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Has a lot of good poems and poets.

180

I check it out from time to time. I mostly post in the writing group when I do post my stuff around here anyway. :)

He who always sits with you, and who gazes
at you, and who hears you so sweetly laughing,
seems to me to equal a god, and sometimes
even surpass one -


if a thing like that is all right to say. What
misery! This rips away all my senses.
When I see you, Lesbia, I am tongue tied.
Words seem to fail.


Flames run through my body, and down my limbs. My
two ears ring and buzz, and my eyes now fail me,
covered, as they are, with a blinding darkness
blacker than midnight.

the last few lines gave me chills! :)

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Jack Gilbert

Kind of. :)

"Wade mouth-deep into love" I like that. Good stuff. :)

Is that a challenge? ;)

:)

Love Incarnate
Frank Bidart


(Dante, Vita Nuova)


To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.
When we love our lord is LOVE.

When I recall that at the fourth hour
of the night, watched by shining stars,
LOVE at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.

In his hands smiling LOVE held my burning
heart, and in his arms, the body whose greeting
pierces my soul, now wrapped in bloodred, sleeping.

He made him wake. He ordered him to eat
my heart. He ate my burning heart. He ate it
submissively, as if afraid as LOVE wept.

:loveya:

THE SCENT OF BURNING HAIR

by Sherwin Bitsui

I circle my shadow
at 5 AM when crickets gather in the doorway
showing their teeth and striped tongues
silver eyes
singing about a wind blown desert
sinking into the waist of the setting sun.

I have become a man crawling over his broken fingers
searching for a ring to plant my lips on,
eating cinders while breaking eggs on my brother's white skin.

I have either become a black dot growing legs
running from the blank page,
or the mud that is caked over the keyhole of a church
hiding its bandaged eyes.

This bed quivers,
it wants to become a spider again
and sting silent the antelope that leap over children
whose mothers abandon their pots
and follow hoof prints into the city
smudging themselves with the smoke of burning hair.
Look! There between the eyes of the horizon
two crows waiting for our bodies.

Imagine this at 5 AM,
when the river slides into a silent city
stuffed with decaying corn husk,
when everyone discovers razors in the womb of this land,
and the sun decides which bridge
should be covered with skin and leaves
and which should remain as goat ribs submerged in
sand smelling of diesel engines.

The Woods To Tuzla

On the soccer field they lay
We imagine they count clouds
Laughter smiling their sunny eyes

We are in the woods to Tuzla
Our brothers and fathers left behind
To sleep where games are played

We are thousands all alone
silent cries in the Balkan wind
Tinged scarlet by restless ghosts

Zombie Sunday (a short poetical history of Spring)

Gentle handed holy father, or whomever,
I mentioned daffodils, and the crowd went wild.
I had them, briefly, nibbling from my blistered hand.
Then I called attention to the dandelions,
popping forth like sunny, tethered corks
from the busy lawn, and the crowd went
home. Lucky for me they left. Mine
was a short list of flowers beginning
with "d," and too late, skulking through the park,
did I recall the daisy, the dahlia,
too late did I invent the dog-wort
and the dwarf poppy. Modern ways.
April. Motorcycles have begun thundering
down the wet avenues like armored bees
slick with the shattered, puddled blooms
of fragrant gasoline and oil, and I've noticed,
from a distance, that in early Spring
the trees don't, all at once, jump to life
like you've read about, but gather to them
a smoky cloud of blue, like tall children
puffing on cigarettes, until, late April, they cough up
a few green leaves. That was my mistake.
Chaucer couldn't name his flowers, either,
or he could name them, but couldn't tell
them apart, or I missed it if he did. It was
Spring. I was involved, moaning in the hedge
and watching college kids whack golf balls
into the drive-in movie screen, which seems,
at night, across the field, like the forehead
of a giant, worried monk, bent over and tending
to his proliferating, moonlit vegetables.
Speaking of monks, I need to read
more Chaucer. Then T.S. Eliot, about
a hundred years later, wasn't he clever?
Bravo, Tom. I can barely look a lilac
directly in the "stamen," a word that never seems right,
no matter how I spell it, a word little more
than a word, if that. I think we thought
T.S. Eliot would ruin sex for the common
fornicator, Our Father, like you and me. I think we
guessed him sort of mortuary in the sack.
That, or (your theory) he was frightened
of the shadow of his penis, rolling unbidden,
like a scuttled go-cart, across the grooved sheets.
And the hyacinths, oh the hyacinths, a flower
I'd like to take by the pistil and fling, if only I could tell one
from a hydrangea, my second flower
beginning with "h." But about old master Eliot
we both were wrong. How like me he is.
I imagine him now, sucking flowers into the tunneled earth
where he riots like a cartoon gopher,
he was a petal hoarder. I much rather
would have slept with Williams, though he did
nothing for Spring, at least in the anthologies,
our able doctor, tapping out his poems
while a lithe America undressed in the little
examination room across the hall.
Read Williams in a paper gown, you tell me,
and all your dreams will come to pass.
But I forgot Emily Dickinson. We all
wanted to sleep with her. She was right
about Spring, if she wrote about it, and she
had those tendencies. My new neighbor,
homeless Jack, greets Spring with a holler.
Emily would have hated him. Me, too,
though she had a thing for abomination.
But what's Emily Dickinson got to do
with the price of methedrine, Jack might
ask. Bravo, Jack. And Rilke, Jack, Rilke was an "autumn."
The tree-line overtaking the movie screen
warbles. The aforementioned flowers,
all varieties, rise like European soccer fans,
and charge the field. Spring, you sent the rain
down this rented stretch of gutter-pipe
on the retched corner of Thomas and Lafayette.
The college kids whack arc after arc
into the monk's forehead, into the tree-line,
into the onanistic wave of oncoming
flowers. I wish I could welcome these days
when the blood begins its rolling boil,
and like a chef, in my palpitating white hat,
I could use the blood to cook a meal
that would finally please you. Daylily,
digitalis, delphinium, dianthus.

Josh Bell


***********************

RL

I'll buy his book next. ;)

OMG. Not a bad poem in the book.

I saw him read too, and he is quite funny...

RL

The Enigma We Answer by Living

Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

~ Alison Hawthorne Deming ~