The Poetry Thread

[connorkimbro]

Do you appreciate poetry? I do! Post your favorites, or post your own. Discuss, critique (constructively) or whatever you like. I'll start with one of my favorites: (it's a british poet, so I'll maintain the british spellings)

The Windhover:
to Christ our Lord
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
--dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding
--Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
--As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
--Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride plume, here
--Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

--No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
--Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
---------------------------------------------------------

(Edit: the forums doesn't appear to preserve the proper spacing. for that reason, i've inserted dashes at the beginnings of lines that are meant to be indented. Not ideal, but oh well.)

I love this poem, because it is so incredibly musical, the lines are so rich and full of sound. It is incredibly fun to read aloud. Such strong alliteration, assonance, consonance. It is an italian sonnet that somehow manages to not sound anything like a sonnet, which I think is also really cool.

Regarding the message, I personally am not religious, but I totally 'get' his inspiration, feeling just completely awestruck at the beauty of the natural world. It's an amazing poem.

Looking forward to your favorites and good discusion. If this is a popular thread, perhaps I'll share some of my own work.

[SlowwHand]

Listen to the Warm
By Rod McKuen

I live alone.
It hasn't always been that way.
It's nice sometimes
to open up the heart a little
and let some hurt come in.
It proves you're still alive.

I'm not sure what it means.
Why we cannot shake the old loves from out minds.
It must be that we build on memory
and make them more that what they were.
And is the manufacture
just a safe device for closing up the wall?

I do remember.
The only fuzzy circumstance
is something where-and how.
Why, I know.
It happens just because we need
to want and to be wanted too,
when love is here or gone
to lie down in the darkness
and listen to the warm.

[SlowwHand]

A Cat Named Sloopy
Rod McKuen



1
For a while
the only earth that Sloopy knew
was in her sandbox.
Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street
were her domain.
Every night she'd sit in the window
among the avocado plants
waiting for me to come home
(my arms full of canned liver and love).
We'd talk into the night then
contented
but missing something,
She the earth she never knew
me the hills I ran
while growing bent.

Sloopy should have been a cowboy's cat
with prairies to run
not linoleum
and real-live catnip mice.
No one to depend on but herself.

I never told her
but in my mind
I was a midnight cowboy even then.
Riding my imaginary horse
down Forty-second Street,
going off with strangers
to live an hour-long cowboy's life,
but always coming home to Sloopy,
who loved me best.

2
A dozen summers
we lived against the world.
An island on an island.
She'd comfort me with purring
I'd fatten her with smiles.
We grew rich on trust
needing not the beach or butterflies
I had a friend named Ben
Who painted buildings like Roualt men.
He went away.
My laughter tired Lillian
after a time
she found a man who only smiled.
Only Sloopy stay and stayed.

Winter.
Nineteen fifty-nine.
Old men walk their dogs.
Some are walked so often
that their feet leave
little pink tracks
in the soft gray snow.

Women fur on fur
elegant and easy
only slightly pure
hailing cabs to take them
round the block and back.
Who is not a love seeker
when December comes?
even children pray to Santa Claus.
I had my own love safe at home
and yet I stayed out all one night
the next day too.

3
They must have thought me crazy
screaming
Sloopy
Sloopy
as the snow came falling
down around me.

I was a madman
to have stayed away
one minute more
than the appointed hour.
I'd like to think a golden cowboy
snatched her from the window sill,
and safely saddlebagged
she rode to Arizona.
She's stalking lizards
in the cactus now perhaps
bitter but free.

I'm bitter too
and not a free man any more.

Once was a time,
in New York's jungle in a tree,
before I went into the world
in search of other kinds of love
nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.

Looking back
perhaps she's been
the only human thing
that ever gave back love to me.



A Cat Named Sloopy is from the book "Listen To The Warm" published by Random House.
Copyright Rod McKuen 1963-1967.

[Meticulous Man]

Élévation

Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,

Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.

Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.

Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l'existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d'une aile vigoureuse
S'élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;

Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!

— Charles Baudelaire

Elevation

Above the lakes, above the vales,
The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas,
Beyond the sun, beyond the ether,
Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,

My soul, you move with ease,
And like a strong swimmer in rapture in the wave
You wing your way blithely through boundless space
With virile joy unspeakable.

Fly far, far away from this baneful miasma
And purify yourself in the celestial air,
Drink the ethereal fire of those limpid regions
As you would the purest of heavenly nectars.

Beyond the vast sorrows and all the vexations
That weigh upon our lives and obscure our vision,
Happy is he who can with his vigorous wing
Soar up towards those fields luminous and serene,

He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
— Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

[Lorizael]

Whoa. I could totally use that poem in my novel. That's eerily fitting.

[connorkimbro]

The Guest House
-Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

[OzzyKP]

Here I sit on a cloud of vapor
Someone stole the toilet paper
Should I wait?
Should I linger?
Nevermind, I'll use my finger

[SlowwHand]

You need to hang around with post-puberty people more, Ozzy.

[OzzyKP]

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

This one's called "The Duchess whose bum fell off". It needs to be read in a Scottish accent, for reasons that seemed entirely reasonable to me at the time I wrote it.


The Duchess said "Doctor! Attend!
And witness my poor nether end!
For while taking tea with my dear Auntie Mabel
my bum sheared clear off and rolled under the table
Oh what am I going to do?

The doctor said "Crivens! Come here.
And straight up your jacksie I'll peer.
Oh don't be upset, my weepy wee poppet.
I've had a good feel of your buggery socket.
It just needs a wee dab of glue."

The Duchess said "Oh woe is me!
It's so unexpected, you see?
Through exercise, massage and dietary fibre
I've always been bestest of friends with my Khyber.
So what could have knackered my flue?"

The doctor said "What of the Duke?
Perhaps to his conduct we'll look."
The duchess said "Well, the course of our marriage
has had an affect on my poor undercarriage.
So I'll pass on the tale to you.

As a youth, His Grace was a sailor
setting sail in both frigate and whaler
and thanks to those formative years in the Navy
he likes to go "dropping his anchor in gravy"
Does that story give you a clue?"

The doctor said "Oh! Michty me!
He'll only perform buggery?
There's no point me making your buttocks become whole
if he can't keep his mucky self out of your bumhole.
So here's what you're going to do.

From the cutlery drawer take a spoon
and bend it from coccyx to poon
and over your ringpiece the spoon will stand sentry
deflecting His Grace to the orthodox entry
relieving himself, and you."

The end of this tale has now come.
Now don't always enter via bum.
Though sodomites may feel that this moral is dotty
you really should take better care of your botty
and it'll take good care of you.

[OzzyKP]

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

It started out as a poem for my kids, but took on a life of its own during the writing, and became far too filthy.

[Al B. Sure!]

Because poetry is supposed to be performed, not existing as mere words on a page... (and also because I'm not typing up these poems from memory cause it'll take too long )

Love:

[Al B. Sure!]

Another love:



My critique of religion and Afrocentrism: (oops. Had the wrong one there for a second)



I have these over hip hop beats if anyone wants to hear them as rap songs.

[giblets]

Does everyone in Philly talk like a black person?