Absolutely wonderful poems on this page. Thanks Alf, Freckle and Old Whippet. Wish I could visit more often. As a newcomer I can feel myself being drawn in - as if I'm staring into a deep, still pool. Is this how it starts?
Here's a little nugget of wisdom I really like:
To be brave is to behave
Bravely when your heart is faint
So you can be really brave
Only when you really ain't
Piet Hein
Originally Posted by Einar
I liked this made me laugh out loud! ...yes, it is like being drawn into the abyss, there is no way out now...!
OW I loved your little haiku...nice to see the auld hound contributing again, I mean all this fell running up geet big scottish mountains can get in the way of poetry sometimes you know ; -)
Oh no! We're doomed! As Private Fraser would say in Dad's Army. By the way,
I'm a he, and not a she
Sometimes I wish
I was a fish
Or a bear
(That would be rare)
Or a bird
But that's absurd!
So a man
I will remain
Until I pass
This way again.
I believe there's been a touch of drizzle in some parts today?
Saturation
The heavens are draining
It's raining and raining
and everything couldn't be wetter,
and things are so bad
that we ought to be glad:
because now they can only get better.
Piet Hein
That is just so very brilliant OW......and raised a smile too
Am Yisrael Chai
Reading in Bed
by Diana Hendry
Best bonus of the solitary life,
late hours, the stack beside the bed as good
as a new lover any night. But now
there's all the courtesies to do, of bed-
side lights and sex and sleep and who's the first
to shut up shop. Tonight it's me. Your thrill-
er, Scorcher, clearly is. I snuggle in,
conscious that you're close but miles away
(in Florida, to be precise). I lie
and listen as the turn of pages slows
down time. The hush-hush sound your thumb's rub makes
is like the lap of waves that lulls me off,
tucked up in self while you, on night watch, learn
whodunnit, why and when and worlds roll by.
Am Yisrael Chai
Last Night
by Sharon Olds
The next day, I am almost afraid.
Love? It was more like dragonflies
in the sun, 100 degrees at noon,
the ends of their abdomens stuck together, I
close my eyes when I remember. I hardly
knew myself, like something twisting and
twisting out of a chrysalis,
enormous, without language, all
head, all shut eyes, and the humming
like madness, the way they writhe away,
and do not leave, back, back,
away, back. Did I know you? No kiss,
no tenderness---more like killing, death-grip
holding to life, genitals
like violent hands clasped tight
barely moving, more like being closed
in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming
I groan to remember it, and when we started
to die, then I refuse to remember,
the way a drunkard forgets. After,
you held my hands extremely hard as my
body moved in shudders like the ferry when its
axle is loosed past engagement, you kept me
sealed exactly against you, our hairlines
wet as the arc of a gateway after
a cloudburst, you secured me in your arms till I slept---
that was love, and we woke in the morning
clasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was
the morning after love.
Am Yisrael Chai
Morning all
Mossy they were two brilliant choices, I really liked the sentiment of the first one, it is very well observed and the second is the perfect compliment to it, I am a big fan of Sharon Olds and would love to see her read.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...t.html?id=5124
Last edited by freckle; 12-09-2010 at 10:27 AM.
Subjects may have moved on since my last view - but this is another blackberry themed one :
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
--Galway Kinnell
The last three poems have all been excellent choices. Is there no end? Here's an old one from across the water...
A White Rose
THE red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips
John Boyle O'Reilly
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