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Poetry Please start one thread for your own poetry and just add to it! |
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#1 |
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What Do Women Want?
I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment from its hanger like I'm choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in. - Kim Addonizio
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Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. - Dorothy Allison
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#2 |
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I don't know why this poem stayed with me for so long. I first read it when I was about 12 in one of my sister's college textbooks. It has remained one of my favorites.
The Listeners by Walter De La Mare 'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head And he smote upon the door again a second time; 'Is there anybody there?' he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller's call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:- 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone. |
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#3 |
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To the Harbormaster
Frank O'Hara I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks, it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
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Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. - H. L. Mencken |
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#4 |
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Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still waters, and not love the one who came there with them, light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin? These are the true religious, the purists, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah, love the priest instead of the God. They do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure, they are like great runners: they know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio- vascular health--just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time. - Sharon Olds
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Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. - Dorothy Allison
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#5 |
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"To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will."
I love that.
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Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. - Dorothy Allison
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#6 |
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The Borders
To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay down, to pray, on me, she was always ferociously courteous, fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness, but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my body fell, the barrier of my spirit. She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted ardently to please her, I would say to her what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers. I served her willingly, and then became very much like her, fiercely out for myself. When my daughter was in me, I felt I had a soul in me. But it was born with her. But when she cried, one night, such pure crying, I said I will take care of you, I will put you first. I will not ever have a daughter the way she had me, I will not ever swim in you the way my mother swam in me and I felt myself swum in. I will never know anyone again the way I knew my mother, the gates of the human fallen. - Sharon Olds
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Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. - Dorothy Allison
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#7 |
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![]() I Ask You Billy Collins What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one, an ordinary night at the kitchen table, floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass, the telephone silent, a pen tilted back in my hand? It gives me time to think about all that is going on outside-- leaves gathering in corners, lichen greening the high grey rocks, while over the dunes the world sails on, huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake. But beyond this table there is nothing that I need, not even a job that would allow me to row to work, or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4 with cracked green leather seats. No, it's all here, the clear ovals of a glass of water, a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin, not to mention the odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall, and the way these three candles-- each a different height-- are singing in perfect harmony. So forgive me if I lower my head now and listen to the short bass candle as he takes a solo while my heart thrums under my shirt-- frog at the edge of a pond-- and my thoughts fly off to a province made of one enormous sky and about a million empty branches. As with most of the truly good poets I know, I was introduced to Billy Collins by e.
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Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. - H. L. Mencken |
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