Today's poet

[Hes]

Been checking into verse daily regularly for a year or so now and there are invariably some gems on there. I really like the fact that a poem about love and heartbreak (or should I say kneecapping) mentions shinsplints:thumbup:

Words, what is the word, matter

"You broke my kneecaps" makes more sense
than "You broke my heart." The jilted
would recognize each other at the bus stop
on crutches and gather their sniffling woe
like a herd of tripods off to the side
and smoke a communal smoke while writing
country songs in their thoughts
that begin with lines such as "Love
is like shin splints." My calling here's
to save the heart from poets
who've troped it to death. Personally
my heart is like the thing I least
want to give away or have stepped on, OK
it's my second least popular organ
to consider being stomped, number one,
according to the accordion of my brain
is my brain. The last time
someone told me he was a sucker
for romance, I licked his face and he
was very much not happy about it.
I was expecting a hint of strawberry
but people taste so much like regret
that cannibalism, notwithstanding
what seems to be the chicken flavor
of all flesh, would be the saddest diet
on the planet. "Honey, who's for dinner"
aren't words I want to say
anymore than "My heart beats only for you."
"My heart beats only for a while"
is a sadder poem anyway so why make this
an anatomy class with cadavers
who were probably inmates to gauge
by the tattoos as I recall them
from college, when I was in love with a woman
who turned to me with a heart in her hand
and said, and I'll never forget this,
"Yuck." Yet I found it beautiful
in how refused and shriveled and stupid
it looked out of context
and wanted to but couldn't
put it back to work and there
it was, failure to be of use
on a scale that to this day makes hope
seem a limping, broken word I love.

by Bob Hicok

[Alf]

Sonnet 48

Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[IanDarkpeak]

Sonnet 48

Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Like"

[Mossdog]

To A Mountain Daisy (standard English translation)

Small, modest, crimson-tipped flower,
You have met me in an evil hour;
For I must crush among the dust
Your slender stem:
To spare you now is past my power,
You lovely gem.

Alas it is not your neighbour sweet,
The bonny lark, companion meet,
Bending you among the dewy wet,
With speckled breast!
When upward springing, blithe, to greet
The purpling east.

Cold blew the bitter-biting north
Upon your early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully you sparkled forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce reared above the parent-earth
Your tender form.

The flaunting flowers our gardens yield,
High sheltering woods and walls must shield;
But you, beneath the random shelter
Of clod or stone,
Adorns the bare stubble field,
Unseen, alone.

There, in your scanty mantle clad,
Your snowy bosom sun-ward spread,
You lift your unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the plough-share tears up your bed,
And low you lie!

Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet floweret of the rural shade!
By loves simplicity betrayed,
And guileless trust;
Until she, like you, all soiled, is laid
Low in the dust.

Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On Life's rough ocean luckless starred!
Unskilled he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him over'.

Such fate to suffering Worth is given,
Who long with wants and woes has striven,
By human pride or cunning driven
To miseries brink;
Till, wretched of every stay but Heaven,
He, ruined, sink!

Even you who mourns the Daisy's fate,
That fate is yours - no distant date;
Stern Ruin's plough-share drives elate,
Full on your bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight
Shall be your doom!

Robbie Burns

[Mossdog]

Just heard this on Poetry Please....

And Nothing Is Ever As You Want To Be

You lose your love for her and then
It is her who is lost,
And then it is both who are lost,
And nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.

In a very ordinary world
A most extraordinary pain mingles with the small routines,
The loss seems huge and yet
Nothing can be pinned down or fully explained.

You are afraid.
If you found the perfect love
It would scald your hands,
Rip the skin from your nerves,
Cause havoc with a computered heart.

You lose your love for her and then it is her who is lost.
You tried not to hurt and yet
Everything you touched became a wound.
You tried to mend what cannot be mended,
You tried, neither foolish nor clumsy,
To rescue what cannot be rescued.

You failed,
And now she is elsewhere
And her night and your night
Are both utterly drained.

How easy it would be
If love could be brought home like a lost kitten
Or gathered in like strawberries,
How lovely it would be;
But nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.


Brian Patten

[Mossdog]

....and I liked this one too. Quite profound in it's apparent simpleness, if rather sad as well. Sorry, I've got the Sunday pm blues...


A blade of grass

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.

Brian Patton

[freckle]

ah mossy you reminded me of brian patten...thank you! ...i like this one especially....he must have written it on a monday night!

Poem written in the street on a rainy evening

Everything I lost was found again
I tasted wine in my mouth
My heart was like a firefly; it moved
Through the darkest objects laughing

There were enough reasons why this was happening
But I never stopped to think about them
I could have said it was your face,
Could have said I’d drunk something idiotic,

But no one reason was sufficient
No one reason was relevant;
My joy was gobbled up by dull surroundings
But there was enough of it

A feast was spread; a world
Was suddenly made edible
And there was forever to taste it........

Brian Pattern

[Mossdog]

ah mossy you reminded me of brian patten...thank you! ...i like this one especially....he must have written it on a monday night!

Poem written in the street on a rainy evening

Everything I lost was found again
I tasted wine in my mouth
My heart was like a firefly; it moved
Through the darkest objects laughing

There were enough reasons why this was happening
But I never stopped to think about them
I could have said it was your face,
Could have said I’d drunk something idiotic,

But no one reason was sufficient
No one reason was relevant;
My joy was gobbled up by dull surroundings
But there was enough of it

A feast was spread; a world
Was suddenly made edible
And there was forever to taste it........

Brian Pattern

Eh that's Luvly -

[Alf]

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.


Eavan Boland

[Alf]

Snow White's Acne

At first she was sure it was just a bit of dried strawberry juice,
or a fleck of her mother's red nail polish that had flaked off
when she'd patted her daughter to sleep the night before.
But as she scrubbed, Snow felt a bump, something festering
under the surface, like a tapeworm curled up and living
in her left cheek.
Doc the Dwarf was no dermatologist
and besides Snow doesn't get to meet him in this version
because the mint leaves the tall doctor puts over her face
only make matters worse. Snow and the Queen hope
against hope for chicken pox, measles, something
that would be gone quickly and not plague Snow's whole
adolescence.
If only freckles were red, she cried, if only
concealer really worked. Soon came the pus, the yellow dots,
multiplying like pins in a pin cushion. Soon came
the greasy hair. The Queen gave her daughter a razor
for her legs and a stick of underarm deodorant.
Snow
doodled through her teenage years—"Snow + ?" in Magic
Markered hearts all over her notebooks. She was an average
student, a daydreamer who might have been a scholar
if she'd only applied herself. She liked sappy music
and romance novels. She liked pies and cake
instead of fruit.
The Queen remained the fairest in the land.
It was hard on Snow, having such a glamorous mom.
She rebelled by wearing torn shawls and baggy gowns.
Her mother would sometimes say, "Snow darling,
why don't you pull back your hair? Show those pretty eyes?"
or "Come on, I'll take you shopping."
Snow preferred
staying in her safe room, looking out of her window
at the deer leaping across the lawn. Or she'd practice
her dance moves with invisible princes. And the Queen,
busy being Queen, didn't like to push it.

Denise Duhamel