Your Favorite Poems

[Hollylane]

The Night Piece

by Thom Gunn

The fog drifts slowly down the hill
And as I mount gets thicker still,
Closes me in, makes me its own
Like bedclothes on the paving stone.

Here are the last few streets to climb,
Galleries, run through veins of time,
Almost familiar, where I creep
Toward sleep like fog, through fog like sleep.

[Hollylane]

I Am Your Mother


I am your Mother, do you not hear my heart beat,
Can you not feel the love I send;
Was not the air you breathed, my scent so sweet,
Is my pain hard for you to comprehend.

Upon my body snow lays soft and white,
Beneath my skin the future sleeps;
My blood flows to nurture and delight,
Into the ground it deeply seeps.

Mountains tall, clouds wreath my crests,
Rolling hills once wooded thick;
Gentle prairies too were once lush with grass,
Where did my bounty go so quick.

Sandy beaches and rock girded shore,
Where ocean waters sweep and crash;
A land of beauty, once so pure,
Marred by man's actions heedless and rash.

All this beauty was yours to behold,
Your duty was to love, cherish and protect;
Feel my anguish, the pain in my soul,
All I asked was your respect.

I am your Mother.

Wazi Nagi, 'Pine Tree Soul'

[Hollylane]

The Highway

by W. S. Merwin

It seems too enormous just for a man to be
Walking on. As if it and the empty day
Were all there is. And a little dog
Trotting in time with the heat waves, off
Near the horizon, seeming never to get
Any farther. The sun and everything
Are stuck in the same places, and the ditch
Is the same all the time, full of every kind
Of bone, while the empty air keeps humming
That sound it has memorized of things going
Past. And the signs with huge heads and starved
Bodies, doing dances in the heat,
And the others big as houses, all promise
But with nothing inside and only one wall,
Tell of other places where you can eat,
Drink, get a bath, lie on a bed
Listening to music, and be safe. If you
Look around you see it is just the same
The other way, going back; and farther
Now to where you came from, probably,
Than to places you can reach by going on.

[Hollylane]

Wrong Turn

by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I'd been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.

[Hominid]

More than my favorite poem, also my modus operandus - I guess not technically a poem, but here it is anyway

Whitman, from "Leaves of Grass":

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

[puddin']

west wind #2

you are young. so you know everything. you leap
into the boat and begin rowing. but listen to me.
without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, i talk directly to your soul. listen to me.
lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. there is life without love. it is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. it is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. when you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.
"

[puddin']

west wind #2

you are young. so you know everything. you leap
into the boat and begin rowing. but listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt,iI talk directly to your soul. listen to me.
lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. there is life without love. it is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. it is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. when you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.
"

[Semantics]

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


by Wendell Berry