Favourite Pomes

[Tift]

beauty is its own excuse for Being

The Rhodora
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

(Rhodora is also Azalea part of the genus Rhododendron)

[Soniaslut]

We Were Rebels

Steamy flirts
Joyride to nowhere
Hard liquor, AC/DC
And the cyberpunk scene
Your breath, my body
My whisper, your goosebumps
Riding the night like a freight train
Catching itself up past midnight
Ranting drunk, singing mad
Sweat enough to fill each empty flask
Mere moans, or more?
Pulse of primal craving
Enhanced heavy-metal overdrive
Ecstasy’s flavor released
All in one soundbite
Stereo drums pounding us into rhythm
At the peak of omitted innocence
A razor’s edge love affair
Inhaling each other’s nicotine
Intoxicating promises
A one-night forever
We were rebels
Born not to last

Immanuel R. Knight

[Tift]

In an Artist's Studio
By Christina Rosetti

One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

                     

[Soniaslut]

Gay
by The Forgotten Soul

I looked into her eyes
A man by my side
And I fell hard
Unsure if it was wise

Then the man fell off the bridge of the unknown
and into the arms of another
Forgetting all before
I slit my wrists, disappointing my mother

Down a dark path I went
I took anything to numb the pain
Then she appeared
Racing through my mind again

I fell even harder
Something about her smile
Drove me off a cliff
and made me realize for her I would run a mile

She looked at me
my body frozen
Embraced with a hug
And I realized love could not be chosen

Her a girl
and me a girl
I decided what she made me feel
was worth giving a whirl

And now she has my heart
As I have hers
I have never felt ashamed
because love is love and with one another we concur

Nothing is too hard yet nothing is too simple
All it took was a ¨hey¨
For me to realize that deep down all along I was gay

Waiting for the right one
I wasted my time with others
And now I finally feel like all the pain has paid off
And one day our children will have two mothers

So thankyou lord for bringing her to me
because i fear without her, I truly would be nothing

https://allpoetry.com/The_Forgotten_Soul

[Tift]

Blue Girls
John Crowe Ransome

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.

[Tift]

Emily Dickinson

(of her 1800 poems only 10 were published in her lifetime,
the rest were collected and published in 1890 four years
after her death and had no titles, only numbers)

254

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

1078

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart,
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity.

[Soniaslut]

The Wild Swans At Coole
William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

[Tift]

Boethius (480 – c.524)

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, canonised St Severinus.
His most powerful contribution to the thought of Western Europe,
the De consolatione philosophiae, preserved in Latin, the subtle and precise
terminology of Plato and Aristotle and, after the Bible, was the most widely-read
book of the Middle Ages.  King Aelfred translated it in the 9th century,
Chaucer in the 14th, Elizabeth I in the 16th and it can be traced in
English literature from Beowolf to Hamlet and Lycidias.  The Bodleian library
preserves a manuscript copy given by Bishop Leofric c.1050
to the cathedral church of Exeter.

Men know the secret caverns of the sea,
Where snow-white pearls are bred,
And where the ruby red,
And on what coast to find
The supple fish or bristling spine.
But where is hid the good their hearts desire,
They know not, groping blind.
That which they seek has climbed afar
Beyond the furthest star,
And lo, they dig a mine.

What shall I pray for minds so dull as these?
This: that they go about
For fame and gold
And having with a mort of pain
Compassed things vain,
They turn from the false thing they hold
And look at last on truth.

=====================================

This bird was happy once in the high trees,
You cage it in your cellar, bring it seed,
Honey to sip, all that its heart can need
Or human love can think of: till it sees,
Leaping too high in its narrow room
The old familiar shadow of the leaves,
And spurns the seed with tiny desparate claws.
Naught but the woods despairing pleads,
The woods, the woods again, it grieves, it grieves.

(text Helen Waddell
translation from the Latin
R. Peiper Leipzig 1871)

[Tift]

Nina's Blues
By Cornelius Eady

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can't know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won't be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/o8R72tk.jpg?1[/img]

[Tift]

Willow
By Anna Akhmatova
(Translated by Jennifer Reeser)

…and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin

And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

[Soniaslut]

You Begin
by Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

[Tift]

Room with a View
By Stephen Swinburne

I live in a room by the sea,
where the view is great and the food is free.
Some of the tenants come and go.
Some I eat, if they're too slow.
One end of me is firmly locked.
The other end just gently rocks.
I live in a room by the sea.
It's perfect for an anemone.

[Soniaslut]

                                                          Darraðarljóð
                                                      (Song of Darraðar)

                                             

[img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img]

From the Icelandic Njal's Saga.
A man called Darraðar has a vision:
Twelve Valkyries are weaving the fate of an ongoing battle on a grisly loom…

                                              Blood rains from the cloudy web
                                              On the broad loom of slaughter.
                                              The web of man grey as armour
                                              Is now being woven; the Valkyries
                                              Will cross it with a crimson weft.

                                              The warp is made of human entrails;
                                              Human heads are used as heddle-weights;
                                              The heddle rods are blood-wet spears;
                                              The shafts are iron-bound and arrows are the shuttles.
                                              With swords we will weave this web of battle.

                                              The Valkyries go weaving with drawn swords,
                                              Hildr and Hjörþrimul, Sangríðr and Svipul.
                                              Spears will shatter shields will splinter,
                                              Swords will gnaw like wolves through armour.

                                              Let us now wind the web of war
                                              Which the young king once waged.
                                              Let us advance and wade through the ranks,
                                              Where friends of ours are exchanging blows.

                                              Let us now wind the web of war
                                              And then follow the king to battle
                                              Gunnr and Göndul can see there
                                              The blood-spattered shields that guarded the king.

                                              Let us now wind the web of war
                                              Where the sacred banner is forging forward
                                              Let his life not be taken;
                                              Only the Valkyries can choose the slain.

                                            Lands will be ruled by new peoples
                                            Who once inhabited outlying headlands.
                                            We pronounce a great king destined to die;
                                            Now an earl is felled by spears.

                                            The men of Ireland will suffer a grief
                                            That will never grow old in the minds of men.
                                            The web is now woven and the battlefield reddened;
                                            The news of disaster will spread through lands.

                                            It is horrible now to look around
                                            As a blood-red cloud darkens the sky.
                                            The heavens are stained with the blood of men,
                                            As the Valkyries sing their song.

                                            We sang well victory songs
                                            For the young king; hail to our singing!
                                            Let him who listens to our Valkyrie song
                                            Learn it well and tell it to others.

                                            Let us ride our horses hard on bare backs,
                                            With swords unsheathed away from here!

…”And then they tore the woven cloth from the loom and ripped it to pieces,
each keeping the shred she held in her hands…
The women mounted their horses and rode away, six to the south and six to the north.”

[img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/8PlNe6K.jpg?4[/img]

With thanks to Michaela Macha and her brilliant website.

[Tift]

By Emily Bronte

Long neglect has worn away
Half the sweet enchanting smile;
Time has turned the bloom to gray;
Mold and damp the face defile.

But that lock of silky hair,
Still beneath the picture twined,
Tells what once those features were,
Paints their image on the mind.

Fair the hand that traced that line,
“Dearest, ever deem me true”;
Swiftly flew the fingers fine
When the pen that motto drew.

[Soniaslut]

I am an incurable romantic
I believe in hope, dreams and decency

    I believe in love,
    Tenderness and kindness.

I believe in mankind.

    I believe in goodness,
    Mercy and charity
    I believe in a universal spirit
    I believe in casting bread
    Upon the waters.

          I am awed by the snow-capped mountains
          By the vastness of oceans.

              I am moved by a couple
              Of any age – holding hands
              As they walk through city streets.

          A living creature in pain
          Makes me shudder with sorrow
          A seagull’s cry fills me
          With a sense of mystery.

              A river or stream
              Can move me to tears
              A lake nestling in a valley
              Can bring me peace.

I wish for all mankind
The sweet simple joy
That we have found together.

I know that it will be.
And we shall celebrate
We shall taste the wine
And the fruit.

Celebrate the sunset and the sunrise
              the cold and the warmth
              the sounds and the silences
              the voices of the children.

Celebrate the dreams and hopes
Which have filled the souls of
All decent men and women.

              We shall lift our glasses and toast
              With tears of joy.

Leonard Nimoy

[Author]

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