Post your favorite poem (by yourself or others)

[Kintamayama]

The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water

-Basho


Tiny acorn seed
Weathers the seasons each year
A towering oak

Uncompromising
You must obey its rules
The laws of nature

What’s a warrior?
One who never flees nor fears
The moment’s challenge

Wealth is very good
Peace of mind even better
Wealth and peace of mind

School starts today!
Soon my head will be filled with
More useless knowledge

Intelligent man
Exhausting twelve hour work days
Meanwhile, my dog naps

-Kintamayama

[Catyoul]

L'invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
- Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

-- Charles Baudelaire

[Macdaddy Warsaw]

I'm not big on poetry, but this is definitely my favorite.

Self-Portrait at 28 by David Berman

I know it's a bad title
but I'm giving myself a gift
on a day nearly cancelled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and i think "at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand"
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from my house
while still seated in this chair
with my eyes closed.

It is a certain hill.
The one I imagine when I hear the word "hill,"
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
if our five million minds collapse at once,
well i'd call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful,
a place I wouldn't mind dying
alone or with you.

I am trying to get at something
and I want to talk very plainly to you
so that we are both comforted by the honesty.

You see, there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I'm stuck,
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don't know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn't made good material either,
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few standout moments:
popping tar bubbles on the driveway in the summer,
a certain amount of pride at school
every time they call it "our sun,"
and playing football when the only play
was "go out long" are what stand out now.

If squeezed for more information
I can remember old clock radios
with flipping metal numbers
and an entree called Surf and Turf.

As a way of getting in touch with my origins,
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born, so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment

and the first thing I do
is take a reading of the day
and try to flow with it,
like when you're riding a mechanical bull
and you strain to learn the pattern quickly
so you don't inadvertently resist it.

II.
I can't remember being born
and no one else can remember it either
even the doctor who I met years later
at a cocktail party.

It's one of the little disappointments
that makes you think about getting away
going to Holly Springs or Coral Gables
and taking a room on the square
with a landlady whose hands are scored
by disinfectant, telling the people you meet
that you are from Alaska, and listen
to what they have to say about Alaska
until you've learned much more about Alaska
than you ever will about Holly Springs or Coral Gables.

Sometimes I'm buying a newspaper
in a strange city and think
"I am about to learn what it's like to live here."
Oftentimes there's a news item
about the complaints of homeowners
who live beside the airport
and I realize that I read an article
on this subject nearly once a year
and always receive the same image:

I am in bed late at night
in my house near the airport
listening to the jets fly overhead,
a strange wife sleeping beside me.
In my mind the bedroom is an amalgamation
of various cold medicine commercial sets
(there is always a box of tissue on the nightstand).

I know these recurring news articles are clues,
flaws in the design, though I haven't figured out
how to string them together yet.
But I'm noticing that the same people
are dying over and over again,

for instance, Minnie Pearl
who died this year
for the fourth time in four years.

III.
Today is the first day of Lent
and once again I'm not really sure what it is.
How many more years will I let pass
before I take the trouble to ask someone?

It reminds me of this morning
when you were getting ready for work.
I was sitting by the space heater,
numbly watching you dress,
and you asked why I never wear a robe
I had so many good reasons
I didn't know where to begin.

If you were cool in high school
you didn't ask too many questions.
You could tell who'd been to last night'sbig
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallways.
You didn't have to ask
and that's what cool was:
the ability to deduce,
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking what you don't know,
which is why kids grow even more stupid.

A yearbook's endpages filled with promises
to stay in touch stands as proof of the uselessness
for a letter from the class stoner
ten years on but...
Do you remember the way the girls
would call out "love you!"
conveniently leaving out the "I"
as if they didn't want to commit
to their own declaration.

I agree that the "I" is a pretty heavy concept
and I hope you won't get uncomfortable
if I should go into some deeper stuff here.

IV.
There are things I've given up on
like recording funny answering-machine messages.
It's part of growing older
and the human race as a group
has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
If I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now.

It's just that are advances are irrepressible now.
Nowaday kids can't even set up lemonade stands.
It makes people feel too self-conscious about the past,
though try explaining that to a kid.

I'm not saying it should be this way.

All this new technology
will eventually give us new feelings
that will never completely displace the old ones,
leaving everyone feeling quite nervous,
and split in two.

We will travel to Mars
even as folks on the Earth
are still ripping open potatoe chip
bags with their teeth.

Why? I don't have the time or intelligence
to make all the connections,
like my friend Gordon
(this is a true story)
who, having grown up in Braintree Massachusetts,
had never pictured a brain snagged in a tree
until I brought it up.
He'd never broken teh name down to its parts.
By then it was too late.
He had moved to Coral Gables.

V.
The hill outside my window is still looking beautiful,
suffused in a kind of golden national park light,
and it seems to say,
I'm sorry the world could not possibly
use another poem about Orpheus
but I'm available if you're not working
on a self-portrait or anything.

I'm watching my dog have nightmares,
twitching and whining on the office floor,
and I try to imagine what beast
has cornered him in the meadow
where his dreams are set.

I'm just letting the day be what it is:
a place for a large number of things
to gather and interact-
not even a place but an occasion,
a reality for real things.

Friends warned me not to get too psychadelic
or religious with this piece:
"they won't accept it if its too psychadelic
or religious," but these are valid topics
and I'm the one with the dog twitching on the floor,
possibly dreaming of me,
that part of me that would beat a dog
for now good reason,
no reason that a dog could see.

I am trying to get at something so simple
that I have to talk plainly
so the words don't disfigure it,
and if it turns out that what I say is untrue,
then at least let it be harmless
like a leaky boat in the reeds
that is bothering no one.

VI.
I can't trust the accuracy of my own memories,
many of them having blended with sentimental
telephone and margerine commercials,
plainly ruined by Madison Avenue,
though no one seems to call the advertising world
"Madison Avenue" anymore. Have they moved?
I need an update on this.

But first I have some business to take care of.

I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today,
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you,
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together,
until a bird calls out or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.

You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and [censored] his head.
For a single moment
my voice is everything:

Self-portrait at 28.

[AJay2000]

Catyoul - Thank you for posting that Baudelaire poem, and not translating. Even though we may not understand it, I love people quoting poets and authors in the native language used.

Now, in conjunction with the W.C.W. poem I posted, a short ditty by Keats. I am a big fan of short poems - not because they are quicker to read, but just because so much can be said in such a short span. This is one of my favorites. Keats is one of my favorite poets, and while 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is magnificent, I think this poem speaks volumes:

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is -
I hold it towards you.

[SNOWBALL]

From 'Ahead of All Parting:
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke'
Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite
space gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for-that
longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes - the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing
of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were
gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;
remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was
merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
into herself, as if there were not enough strength
to create them a second time. Have you imagined
Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"?
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that
gathered in the snap of release it can be more than
itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only
saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them
off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,
kneeling and didn't notice at all:
so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure
God's voice -far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind
and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
It is murmuring toward you now from those who died
young.
Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church
in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?
Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,
as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance
of injustice about their death - which at times
slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. -Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have
created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit's growth-: could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god
had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

[keikiwai]

Rimbaud ftw

Le dormeur du val

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

A translation:

The Sleeper in the Valley

There’s a recess in the greenery, where the river sings
Tangling wildly in the tattered grass
Silvery; where the sun from the proud mountain
Glimmers; It’s a little valley that sparkles with light.

A young soldier, mouth open, head bare,
And nape bathing in the cool blue cresses
Sleeping; he’s spread out on the grass, under the clouds,
Pale on his green bed where the light rains down.

Feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling like
A sick child would smile, he dozes.
Warmly lull him Nature, he’s cold.

The scents no longer make his nose quiver
He sleeps in the sun, hand on his chest
Tranquil, he has two red holes on his right side.

[Coffee]

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

----------------------------

There's a letter on the desktop
That I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
From our adolescent war
And I start to feel a fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams

The Mississippi's mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across with five steps down
And I guess that's how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown

And there's not enough room in this world for my pain
Signals crossed and love gets lost and time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits
I need you the most
I'm in love with your ghost
I'm in love with your ghost

Dark and dangerous like a secret
That's whispered in a hush
When I wake the things I dreamt about you
Last night make me blush
When you kiss me like a lover
Then you sting me like a viper
I go follow you to the river
Play your memory like the piper

And I feel it like a sickness
How this love is killing me
But I'd walk into the fingers
Of your fire willingly

And I dance the edge of sanity
I've never been this close
In love with your ghost

Unknowing captor
You'll never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can't touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free?
Oh, I'm forever under lock and key
As you pass through me

Now I see your face before me
I would launch a thousand ships
To bring your heart back to my island
As the sand beneath me slips
As I burn up in your presence
And I know now how it feels
To be weakened like Achilles
With you at my heels

And my bitter pill to swallow
Is the silence that I keep
It poisons me
I can't swim free
The river is too deep
Though I'm baptized by your touch
I'm no worse at most
In love with your ghost

You are shadowing my dreams

-Indigo Girls

[27offsuit]

When I was in 7th grade, I wrote a Haiku that my overtly gay English teacher went batty over:

As the big dogs sits
The small dog proudly stands up
And feels much bigger

[DONKTARDO]

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!


--Rudyard Kipling

[TiK]

Not too deep like many of the poems already posted, but quite humorous (or so I thought).

The Perfect high

Shel Silverstein

There once was a boy named Gimme-Some-Roy...
He was nothin' like me or you,
'cause laying back and getting high
was all he cared to do.

As a kid, he sat in the cellar...sniffing airplane glue.
And then he smoked banana peels, when that was the thing to do.
He tried aspirin in Coca-Cola, he breathed helium on the sly,
and his life became an endless search to find the perfect high.

But grass just made him wanna lay back and eat chocolate-chip pizza all night,
and the great things he wrote when he was stoned looked like s*** in the morning light.
Speed made him wanna rap all day, reds laid him too far back,
Cocaine-Rose was sweet to his nose, but the price nearly broke his back.

He tried PCP, he tried THC, but they never quite did the trick.
Poppers nearly blew his heart, mushrooms made him sick.
Acid made him see the light, but he couldn't remember it long.
Hash was a little too weak, and smack was a lot too strong.
Quaaludes made him stumble, booze just made him cry,
Then he heard of a cat named Baba Fats who knew of the perfect high.

Now, Baba Fats was a hermit cat...lived high up in Nepal,
High on a craggy mountain top, up a sheer and icy wall.
"Well, hell!" says Roy, "I'm a healthy boy, and I'll crawl or climb or fly,
Till I find that guru who'll give me the clue as to what's the perfect high."

So out and off goes Gimme-Some-Roy, to the land that knows no time,
Up a trail no man could conquer, to a cliff no man could climb.
For fourteen years he climbed that cliff...back down again he'd slide
He'd sit and cry, then climb some more, pursuing the perfect high.

Grinding his teeth, coughing blood, aching and shaking and weak,
Starving and sore, bleeding and tore, he reaches the mountain peak.
And his eyes blink red like a snow-blind wolf, and he snarls the snarl of a rat,
As there in repose, and wearing no clothes, sits the god-like Baba Fats.

"What's happenin', Fats?" says Roy with joy, "I've come to state my biz
I hear you're hip to the perfect trip... Please tell me what it is.
"For you can see," says Roy to he, "I'm about to die,
So for my last ride, tell me, how can I achieve the perfect high?"

"Well, dog my cats!" says Baba Fats. "Another burned out soul,
Who's lookin' for an alchemist to turn his trip to gold.
It isn't in a dealer's stash, or on a druggist's shelf
Son, if you would find the perfect high, find it in yourself."

"Why, you jive mother-f*****!" says Gimme-Some Roy, "I climbed through rain and sleet,
I froze three fingers off my hands, and four toes off my feet!
I braved the lair of the polar bear, I've tasted the maggot's kiss.
Now, you tell me the high is in myself? What kinda s*** is this?

My ears, before they froze off," says Roy, "had heard all kindsa crap;
But I didn't climb for fourteen years to hear your sophomore rap.
And I didn't climb up here to hear that the high is on the natch,
So you tell me where the real stuff is, or I'll kill your guru ass!"

"Okay...okay," says Baba Fats, "You're forcin' it outta me...
There is a land beyond the sun that's known as Zabolee.
A wretched land of stone and sand, where snakes and buzzards scream,
And in this devil's garden blooms the mystic Tzutzu tree.

Now, once every ten years it blooms one flower, as white as the Key West sky,
And he who eats of the Tzutzu flower shall know the perfect high.
For the rush comes on like a tidal wave...hits like the blazin' sun.
And the high? It lasts forever, and the down don't never come.

But, Zabolee Land is ruled by a giant, who stands twelve cubits high,
And with eyes of red in his hundred heads, he awaits the passer-by.
And you must slay the red-eyed giant, and swim the river of slime,
Where the mucous beasts await to feast on those who journey by.
And if you slay the giant and beasts, and swim the slimy sea,
There's a blood-drinking witch who sharpens her teeth as she guards the Tzutzu tree."

"Well, to hell with your witches and giants," says Roy, "To hell with the beasts of the sea
Why, as long as the Tzutzu flower still blooms, hope still blooms for me."
And with tears of joy in his sun-blind eyes, he slips the guru a five,
And crawls back down the mountainside, pursuing the perfect high.

"Well, that is that," says Baba Fats, sitting back down on his stone,
Facing another thousand years of talking to God, alone.
"Yes, Lord, it's always the same...old men or bright-eyed youth...
It's always easier to sell 'em some s*** than it is to tell them the truth."