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Favourite Poems & Poems that moved you

Cerpin_Taxt

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As my signature would ascribe too, I'm a big Eliot fan.

Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot, T.S. 1917. Prufrock and Other Observations

Also, Kubla Kahn by Colerdige:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !


The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
I've always had an affinity towards anything by Georg Trakl, J.K. Baxter, and W.B. Yeats.
 

Thursday

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Judith Moreno " Vignette "
Untitiled : Cerritos College Writers Anonymous Magazine-Spring 2007

I want to be rendered speechless
with only the guttural,
animalistic sounds of
raw
human emotion
being torn from my throat
 

Noel

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sunflower sutra - ginsberg
the rime of the ancyent marinere - coleridge
Beowulf
Leaves of Grass
 

Climber07

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At Thirty
by Lynda Hull


Whole years I knew only nights: automats
& damp streets, the Lower East Side steep

with narrow rooms where sleepers turn beneath
alien skies. I ran when doorways spoke

rife with smoke & zippers. But it was only the heart's
racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want

until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke
of my body by the last margin of land where the river

mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens,
a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as

barges loose glittering mineral freight
& behind me facades gleam with pigeons

folding iridescent wings. Their voices echo
in my voice naming what is lost, what remains.
 

Mort Belfry

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The first couple of stanzas of Cameron Seimen Wendell's Tom-Tom the Farmer particularly moved me.

Tom-Tom the Farmer,
He owned many a pig.
Tom-Tom was happy,
So he danced a merry jig.
He danced through his pigs and said, "Way-hee!"
"I'm going to eat a pig for tea."

The pigs said, "Oh fuck,"
"One of us must be eaten."
"But who shall it be?" said Steve,
The pig who was often beaten.

"You, you cunt!" the pigs all laughed,
"You're going to die you cunt!"
And all the pigs,
Danced a merry jig,
From the old sow to the runt.

So Tom-Tom and his pigs all danced,
While Steve sat on his laurels.
But though the prick,
Was often dicked,
He also had no morals.

So he pulled out a gun,
And shot everyone,
And danced and said "Way-hee!"
"To be quite blunt,"
"You fucking cunts,"
"I'm eating you for tea!"

Such brutal honesty in his interpretation of capitalism incited an entire generation of poets to intellectual violence.
 

Eileen

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Apparently Neruda's big among the MBTI enthusiasts.

Pablo Neruda said:
Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I also love John Donne's holy sonnets... especially the one about the BDSM relationship between the speaker and God. ;)

John Donne said:
XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.


And a friend sent this Mary Oliver poem to me when my brother died. I love it (and the following one, which also reminds me of Matthew) a lot.

Mary Oliver said:
In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver said:
When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve--
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.
 

Cerpin_Taxt

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Apparently Neruda's big among the MBTI enthusiasts.



I also love John Donne's holy sonnets... especially the one about the BDSM relationship between the speaker and God. ;)




And a friend sent this Mary Oliver poem to me when my brother died. I love it (and the following one, which also reminds me of Matthew) a lot.

I'm not strictly a Christian, however, I consider myself to be of the religious temperament and, as such, I felt a significant resonance with the John Donne poem you posted.
 

Ivy

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In an alternate timeline I would have studied John Donne in grad school. I may still!
 

Sarcasticus

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Wild Geese
by 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
 

Eileen

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Wild Geese
by 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


I was a part of a Lutheran/Methodist campus ministry in college, and we had this great [essentially Unitarian] campus minister. Every year we took a retreat to the mountains, and every year, we climbed up this terribly steep hill to have our Sunday worship experience. One year, he read us that (among other things).
 

Eileen

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Here's one that I come back to occasionally:

Is/Not - Margaret Atwood

i.
Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your suprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but agaist you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

ii

I am not a saint or a cripple,
I am not a wound; now I will see
whether I am a coward.


I dispose of my good manners,
you don't have to kiss my wrists.

This is a journey, not a war,
there is no outcome,
I renounce predictions


and aspirins, I resign the future
as I would resign an expired passport:
picture and signature gone
along with holidays and safe returns.


We're stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings


where there is nothing spectacular
to see and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs


where we must walk slowly,
where we may not get anywhere


or anything, where we keep going,
fighting our ways, our way
not out but through.
 

Spartacuss

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Theodore Roethke

ELEGY FOR JANE
My Student, Thrown by a Horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
 

swordpath

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Ivy

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How can you understand that poem, Sensor? ;)

I've always loved that one.
 
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