Favorite Poems

wilde · Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:48 am

I'm not a huge poetry reader but I just wanted to share one of my favorites.

"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale.


	Quote: There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Post-apocalyptic poetry! Who knew! :lol:

If you like it, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story based on the poem.
(I actually heard of the story first, because there is a reference to it in the game Fallout 3. See, literature and games can mix.

)

What about you? What are your favorite poems?

oblivion · Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:45 pm

Thank you , Wilde. I really enjoyed reading it. I especially like the 2nd line.

Saffron · Sat Feb 05, 2011 9:50 pm

With St. Valentine's Day so close I am thinking of love and passion. Here is one of my all time favorite peoms. I love that it describes the tangle and sometimes confusion (as in whose hand is this - yours or mine), but most of all the joy of love making.

i like my body when it is with your
E.E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Edit in:
I feel I need to clarify this statement:
I love that it describes the tangle and sometimes confusion
Describe was in a way the wrong word. It is the syntax of the poem that conveys the tangle and confusion.

oblivion · Sun Feb 06, 2011 4:12 am

I'll mull over this a while. I can't really seem to get into cummings but I think it is more of an idea of practice and patience than anything else, so I'll give it a try.
Thanks, Saffron.

DWill · Sun Feb 06, 2011 8:45 am

For some reason I like the word "possibly" at the end. It seems kind of shy or just really understated. Thanks for posting the poem.

Penelope · Sun Feb 06, 2011 12:59 pm

This is my favourite Valentine Poem:

Valentine

The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like to successfully guess your weight and win you at a fte.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders, too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I’d like all your particulars in folders marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath) in rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work, on hinges.

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I’d like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I’d like to give you just the right amount and get some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you nod and hold a teacup. I like your legs when you unwind
them.
Even in trousers I don’t mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.
I like the little crease behind them.
I’d always know, without a recap, where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I’d like to cross two hemispheres and have you chase me.
I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt and cancelling other dates.
I’d like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I’d let you put insecticide into my wine.
I’d even like you if you were the Bride of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde.
I’d even like you as my Julian of Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of boolean mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I’d like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin. And see you grin.
I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin,
I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence.
I’d like to be your second look.
I’d like to let you try the French Defence and mate you with my rook.
I’d like to be your preference and hence
I’d like to be around when you unhook.
I’d like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book, your future tense.

John Fuller

oblivion · Mon Feb 07, 2011 3:09 am

Thanks, Penelope! I really enjoyed these lines:

...make you cower
By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer

lady of shallot · Sun Feb 13, 2011 2:53 pm

Here is mine. Also by e.e. cummings.
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

obviously I like the lady of shallot.
Loved the three poems on this page.

Saffron · Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:49 am

The Cinnamon Peeler
by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.

Penelope · Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:50 am

Thank you Saffron. What a sublimely erotic poem.

Or is it just me? Any it is absolutely beautiful and one I shall keep.

Saffron · Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:17 am


	Penelope wrote: Thank you Saffron. What a sublimely erotic poem. Or is it just me? Any it is absolutely beautiful and one I shall keep.

Not just you. I clipped this poem from the newspaper years and years ago. It gives me goosebumps. I love the idea of being marked by ones lover -- especially smell.

lady of shallot · Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:42 am

For love poems this is my favorite:

How She Resolved to Act

"I shall be careful to say nothing at all
About myself or what I know of him
Or the vaguest thought I have -- no matter how dim,
Tonight if it so happen that he call."
And now ten minutes later the doorbell rang
And into the hall he stepped as he always did
With a face and a bearing that quite poorly hid
His brain that burned and his heart that fairly sang
And his tongue that wanted to be rid of the truth.
As well as she could, for she was very loath
To signify how she felt, she kept very still,
But soon her heart cracked loud as a coffee mill
And her brain swung like a comet in the dark
And her tongue raced like a squirrel in the park.

Merrill Moore (1903-1957)

this is a beautiful expression of incipient love. I especially love the last three lines.

Also this one is from Rupert Brooke

And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again
and still remember, a tale I have heard or known
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that loved - or did not love - and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil foolishly
A long while since, and by some other sea

The painful loss of love.

Penelope · Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:23 pm

This is a fragment of a poem which I read many, many years ago in 'The Reader's Digest Magazine'.....This is as much as I remember, but it is one of the poems which has lived with me ever since:-

I love God, he placed tiny little plants and mosses
in the woods
for me to wonder at.

I love God, he gave me a man
whose soul shines in his eyes,
and in his face as he sleeps,

I Love God,
He makes my children, naughty,
mischievous, quarrelsome....
and then he puts pure joy into them.
I love Him for that.

lady of shallot · Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:48 am

Oh, dear I just realized I posted the same poems two different places! Oh well as my husband said yesterday after gifting me with a book, I specifically told him I would not find useful only two days ago. . . getting older does make life interesting!

Oh, dear Penelope that poem is one I would want to immediately forget!

Penelope · Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:21 pm


	Quote: LofS wrote: Oh, dear Penelope that poem is one I would want to immediately forget!

I know you would darling. But I liked it because it's about the different kinds of things which make us feel thankful to be alive, and joyous.

The joy comes from all kinds of different things to different people. And some times the joy just bubbles up for no obvious reason at all. Don't you just love it when that happens?

It wouldn't do for us to be all the same, now would it?

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