Other people's poems

Farewell Love and All Thy Laws Forever 

Farewell love and all thy laws forever; 
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more. 
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore 
To perfect wealth, my wit for to endeavour. 
In blind error when I did persever, 
Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore, 
Hath taught me to set in trifles no store 
And scape forth, since liberty is lever. 
Therefore farewell; go trouble younger hearts 
And in me claim no more authority. 
With idle youth go use thy property 
And thereon spend thy many brittle darts, 
For hitherto though I have lost all my time, 
Me lusteth no lenger rotten boughs to climb. 

Sir Thomas Wyatt 


 
Animal Spirit 

I wish there was a cat in me
Giving love like a huge favour
But there's just a little puppy
Begging for it

Tanja Bulovic 

Poem of the Day: Wanting Sumptuous Heavens

BY ROBERT BLY

No one grumbles among the oyster clans,

And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.

Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want

Heaven to be, and God to come, again.

There is no end to our grumbling; we want

Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.

But the heron standing on one leg in the bog

Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Lack of Courage Most days I feel Like I am Losing so much time Sitting Waiting Hoping For you to change Never knowing quite for sure If it is me or you that must change Always believed that by Not moving Making no decision Is the same as making one Wondering if it is due to my lack of strength Or no courage To take those hits That will happen if I choose To move Now Wish I knew if this was truly my choice Or one made only by lack of my courage Linda Engwall  Poem of the Day: Dedication BY CZESLAW MILOSZ You whom I could not save Listen to me.    Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.    I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.    I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. What strengthened me, for you was lethal.    You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,    Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;    Blind force with accomplished shape. Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge    Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;    And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave    When I am talking with you. What is poetry which does not save    Nations or people?    A connivance with official lies,    A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,    Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,    That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,    In this and only this I find salvation. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds    To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.    I put this book here for you, who once lived    So that you should visit us no more.    Warsaw, 1945 The Crocodile How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale! How cheerfully he seems to grin How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! Lewis Carroll  Poem of the Day: The Kiss BY ROBERT GRAVES Are you shaken, are you stirred     By a whisper of love, Spellbound to a word     Does Time cease to move, Till her calm grey eye     Expands to a sky And the clouds of her hair     Like storms go by? Then the lips that you have kissed     Turn to frost and fire, And a white-steaming mist     Obscures desire: So back to their birth     Fade water, air, earth, And the First Power moves     Over void and dearth. Is that Love? no, but Death,     A passion, a shout, The deep in-breath,     The breath roaring out, And once that is flown,     You must lie alone, Without hope, without life,     Poor flesh, sad bone. Poem of the Day: Early in the Morning BY LI-YOUNG LEE While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher's ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother's hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening. Poem of the Day: Mild is the Parting Year BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Mild is the parting year, and sweet          The odour of the falling spray; Life passes on more rudely fleet,          And balmless is its closing day. I wait its close, I court its gloom,          But mourn that never must there fall Or on my breast or on my tomb          The tear that would have soothed it all. Poem of the Day: The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill BY HAYDEN CARRUTH You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing a letter in these circumstances. I thought it strange too—the first time. But there's a misconception I was laboring under, and you are too, viz. that the imagination in your vicinity is free and powerful. After all, you say, you've been creating yourself all along imaginatively. You imagine yourself playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or writing a poem and then it becomes true. But you still have to do it, you have to exert yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man. I can deluge Congress with letters telling every one of those mendacious sons of bitches exactly what he or she is, in maybe about half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist proclivities, when you imagine bliss you still must struggle to get there. By the way the Buddha has his place across town on Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a lot better than he used to. He always carries a jumping jack with him everywhere just for contemplation, but he doesn't make it jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest, cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air, so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree. Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any fucking thing I want. Speaking of which there's this dazzling young Naomi who wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee last winter, and I think this is the moment for me to go and pay her my respects. Don't go way. I'll be right back. Poem of the Day: Upon the Infant Martyrs BY RICHARD CRASHAW To see both blended in one flood, The mothers' milk, the children's blood, Make me doubt if heaven will gather Roses hence, or lilies rather. Poem of the Day: The War Horse BY EAVAN BOLAND This dry night, nothing unusual    About the clip, clop, casual Iron of his shoes as he stamps death Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth. I lift the window, watch the ambling feather Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,    Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.    Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn— Of distant interest like a maimed limb,    Only a rose which now will never climb The stone of our house, expendable, a mere    Line of defence against him, a volunteer You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head    Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead. But we, we are safe, our unformed fear Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted    Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated? He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge    Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street    Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait, Then to breathe relief lean on the sill    And for a second only my blood is still With atavism. That rose he smashed frays    Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days Of burned countryside, illicit braid: A cause ruined before, a world betrayed. Poem of the Day: Spring BY CHLOE HONUM Mother tried to take her life. The icicles thawed. The house, a wet coat we couldn't put back on. Still, the garden quickened, the fields were firm. Birds flew from the woods' fingertips. Among the petals and sticks and browning fruit, we sat in the grass and bickered, chained daisies, prayed. All that falls is caught. Unless it doesn't stop, like moonlight, which has no pace to speak of, falling through the cedar limbs, falling through the rock.