Your Favorite Poems

[Semantics]

To Eva Descending the Stair

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear;
The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

The asteroids turn traitor in the air,
And planets plot with old elliptic cunning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.

Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair:
Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere,
In solar schemes the titled suns go turning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.

Loud the immortal nightingales declare:
Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Circling zodiac compels the year.
Intolerant beauty never will be learning.
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Sylvia Plath

[Diva]

I love anything Christina Rossetti (English Victorian poetress; 1830~1894) ever wrote. This is, perhaps my favorite piece of hers:

A Birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.


Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs~de~lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

(November 18, 1857)

[atomiczombie]

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

Edward Estlin Cummings

[Jet]

Haiku Ambulance


A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?

—Richard Brautigan

[Lynn]

When I started my new life, this became my anthem. I still swell up inside when I read it.


The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

[Diva]

Another favorite from Christina Rossetti



In The Lane

When my love came home to me,
Pleasant summer bringing,
Every tree was out in leaf,
Every bird was singing.

There I met her in the lane
By those waters gleamy,
Met her toward the fall of day,
Warm and dear and dreamy.
Did I loiter in the lane?
None was there to see me.

Only roses in the hedge,
Lilies on the river,
Saw our greeting fast and fond,
Counted gift and giver,
Saw me take her to my home,
Take her home forever.

[atomiczombie]

I Am A Beggar Always


i am a beggar always
who begs in your mind

(slightly smiling, patient, unspeaking
with a sign on his
chest
BLIND)yes i

am this person of whom somehow
you are never wholly rid(and who

does not ask for more than
just enough dreams to
live on)
after all, kid

you might as well
toss him a few thoughts

a little love preferably,
anything which you can't
pass off on other people: for
instance a
plugged promise-

the he will maybe (hearing something
fall into his hat)go wandering
after it with fingers;till having

found
what was thrown away
himself
taptaptaps out of your brain, hopes, life
to(carefully turning a
corner)never bother you any more

e. e. cummings