Favourite Poems & Poems that moved you

[Starry]

First Poem For You
-Kim Addonizio


I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet
on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; trying...

 

[Cellmold]

 

[Salomé]

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears like a lover.
It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife.

 

[Salomé]

Rain by Don Patterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

 

[five sounds]

Ok, this is a quote not a poem, but I can't find the quote thread for the life of me.

"Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance."

 

[Noll]

someone else may have posted it and it's not a poem, but still:

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane."

 

[CheshireCat]

Psychoneurotics Manifesto 1972 brochure

Be greeted, psychoneuroics!

For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world, uncertainty among the world’s certainties.

For you often feel others as you feel yourselves.

For you feel the anxiety of the world and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance.

For your phobia of washing yours hands from the dirt of the world, for your fear of being locked in the world’s limiations, for your fear of the absurdity of existence.

For your subtlety in the not telling others what you see in them.

For your awkardness in dealing with practical things, and for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things, for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism, for your exclusieness and fear of losing close friends, for your creativity and ecstasy, for your maladjustments to “that which is” and adjustments to “that which ought to be” for your great but unutilized abilities.

For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you.

For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force, for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you.

For the lonliness and strangeness of your ways.

Be greeted.

 

[AzulEyes]

So can we post our own poems? Or is there another poem thread? (Or perhaps I should start one!)

Funny your assumptions
Silly what you conclude
I am not a box
In your compartmentalized world

Funny you would give advice
For something not in your skill
Funny you would assume
I would swallow your pill (hah right)

Assuming my friendship
Can be conveniently "shelved"
Is setting yourself up
For dissapointment and hell

For my choice is long made
When you made the choice
To continue to hurt me
When I asked you to hear my voice

When I asked you to stop

And you didn't stop

That's when our friendship ended

When you showed your true colors

That you were never a friend.

You're not my friend.

 

[AzulEyes]

Last night you kissed me
Hugged me tightly
A bond everlasting
Comforting and right
You've loved me
Through it all
Put my heart
On a pedestal
Caring for it
Tenderly and carefully
I will hold your hand
I won't let go
I will make up for any
Missteps
I will energize your soul
Until you burst
You are deserving
And so much more

 

[EJCC]

To A Violet on All Saint's Day
by Paul Laurence Dunbar


Belated wanderer of the ways of spring,
Lost in the chill of grim November rain,
Would I could read the message that you bring
And find in it the antidote for pain.

Does some sad spirit out beyond the day,
Far looking to the hours forever dead,
Send you a tender offering to lay
Upon the grave of us, the living dead?

Or does some brighter spirit, unforlorn,
Send you, my little sister of the wood,
To say to some one on a cloudful morn,
“Life lives through death, my brother, all is good?”

With meditative hearts the others go
The memory of their dead to dress anew.
But, sister mine, bide here that I may know,
Life grows, through death, as beautiful as you.

 

[funkadelik]

I consider this a poem. And good lord is it a good one:

 

[LittleV]

My sister told me to read her favorite poetry book:

Before I fell
in love with words,
with setting skies
and singing birds–
it was you I fell
in love with first.

 

[wolfy]

Bluebird. Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the ****s and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

 

[Firebird 8118]

One of my all-time favorites (and my brother's):

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~Robert Frost

 

[LonestarCowgirl]

Hurt and pain.
There's much to gain.
Peace and love.
It's all the same.
Confusion and doubt.
We're not without.
We weep, we cry.
We plead, we try.
We laugh, we smile.

 

[Odi et Amo]

Though I know indeed
That the night will come again
After day has dawned,
Still, in truth, I hate the sight
Of the morning's coming light.

 

[Eumeswilian]

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

This reading and video interpretation was especially moving: http://vimeo.com/7717236

 

[Starry]

Perhaps it is the NF in me...but I feel ill at ease that we do not have a Love Poetry thread *sigh*
but...this will do. I don't know what to think of Valentine's Day anymore. It seems more and more people are angered by it...depressed by it.
I want more days for Love but...
Here's one of my favorite Valentine's poems. Buon San Valentino.


Sonnet CXXX
My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing like the Sun - William Shakespeare


My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

 

[Noon]

Sister of a Stone | Filipino Poet

 

[Noon]

Mysticism
by Farid ud-Din Attar

The sun can only be seen by the light
of the sun. The more a man or woman knows,
the greater the bewilderment, the closer
to the sun the more dazzled, until a point
is reached where one no longer is.

A mystic knows without knowledge, without
intuition or information, without contemplation
or description or revelation. Mystics
are not themselves. They do not exist
in selves. They move as they are moved,
talk as words come, see with sight
that enters their eyes. I met a woman
once and asked her where love had led her.
"Fool, there's no destination to arrive at.
Loved one and lover and love are infinite."