Poems We Love - a place to share poetry

[Guest]

.

[Peter S]

So here it is...   finally a place on Kiva Friends for those who want to share the poetry and poets they love, without launching it into the chaos and rapid oblivion that is Anything Goes...


Popcorn leaps, popping from the floor
of a hot black skillet
and into my mouth.
Black words leap,
snapping from the white
page.  Rushing into my eyes.  Sliding
into my brain which gobbles them
the way my tongue and teeth
chomp the buttered popcorn.

When I have stopped reading,
ideas from the words stay stuck
in my mind, like the sweet
smell of butter perfuming my
fingers long after the popcorn
is finished.

I love the book and the look of words
the weight of ideas that popped into my mind.
I love the tracks
of new thinking in my mind.

I Love the Look of Words, by Maya Angelou




I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,,,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,, ,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

Notes on the Art of Poetry, by Dylan Thomas


So here's to the delight and glory and oddity and light

[Peter S]

An Arundel Tomb, by Philip Larkin (1956)

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.


Here is a photo of the 14th century table tomb in Chichester Cathedral that inspired this subtle and beautiful poem.

[Henry]

http://www.mywriterscircle.com/index.php?topic=8437.0
 

[Jill]

      You know how I've been telling you that
Poetry Needs to Be Read Aloud?
    If this works, I'll be giving you the poem and
the poet reading his poem.    Watch his face.  He's wonderful!
It goes without saying that Splashdown Quacker Jack and I loved this ....

        "Golden Retrievals"

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don't think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who's -- oh
joy -- actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I'm off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you're sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you can never bring back,

or else you're off in some fog concerning
-- tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time's warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master's bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
                                               Mark Doty


EDIT: If you click on the little paper clippy thing at the very bottom,
         I think you can get the video of the poet reading-- pretending he's the dog.
       
          If that doesn't work for you,
         then click on the immediately following link -- scroll to "Golden Retrievals" and click on that.
         Would somebody please write back and let me know if one or both of those ways worked, please?
          http://www.pbs.org/wnet/foolingwithwords/main_video.html           

          Oh, and thanks, Peter.
          An especially great crypt, etc.
         

[Jill]

      Art, Books, Poetry, Things That Make Us Happy....
I'm really hoping that more of you will choose to share.....

     AN  HISTORIC  MOMENT
     The man said,
     after inventing poetry,
     “WOW!”
     and did a full somersault.
                          William J. Harris


To P.J.
(2 yrs old who sed write a poem for me in Portland,Oregon)

if i cud ever write a
poem as beautiful as u
little 2/yr/old/brotha,
i wud laugh, jump, leap
up and touch the stars
cuz u be the poem i try for
each time i pick up a pen and paper.
u. and Morani and Mungu
be our blue/blk/stars that
will shine on our lives and
makes us finally BE.
if i cud ever write a poem as beautiful
as u, little 2/yr/old/brotha,
poetry wud go out of bizness.
         Sonia Sanchez


ONLY  BE  WILLING  TO  SEARCH  FOR  POETRY
Only be willing to search for poetry, and there will be poetry:
My soul, a tiny speck, is my tutor.
Evening sun and fragrant grass are common things,
But with understanding, they can become glorious verse.
                         Yuan Mei

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To Tu Fu

On the Mountain of Boiled Rice I met Tu Fu,
Wearing a bamboo hat in the hot midday;
Pray, how is it that you have grown so thin?
Is it because you suffer from poetry?
               Li Po
--
         
         Ink runs from the corner of my
         mouth.
         There is no happiness like mine.         
         I have been eating poetry.
                  Mark Strand


“Poetry  is  an  echo,  asking  a  shadow  to  dance.”
                  Carl Sandburg         
--

“Oh, to poet like a laser, to pierce darkness with one word.”
                                                       Nikki Grimes
                                 
                                 --

“If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”   
            W.C. Grimes   


                                       THE SECRET
      
                                        Two girls discover
               the secret of life
               in a sudden line of
               poetry.

               I who don’t know the
               secret wrote
               the line. They
               told me

               (Through a third person)
               they had found it
               but not what it was
               not even

               what line it was.  No doubt
               by now, more than a week
               later, they have forgotten
               the secret,

               the line, the name of
               the poem.  I love them
               for finding what
               I can’t find,

               and for loving me
               for the line I wrote,
               and for forgetting it
               so that

               a thousand times, till death
               finds them, they may
               discover it again, in other
               lines

               in other
               happenings. And for
               wanting to know it,
               for

               assuming there is
               such a secret, yes,
               for that
               most of all.
                                                       Denise Levertov


                                                                 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Betty Botter is more fun to read aloud if you've had a few beers, first.

                   BETTY BOTTER
               
                Betty Botter bought some butter,
      But, she said, this butter’s bitter;
      If I put it in my batter,
      It will make my batter bitter,
      But a bit of better butter
      Will make my batter better.
      So she bought a bit of butter
      Better than her bitter butter,
      And she put it in her batter,
      And it made her batter better,
      So ‘twas a better Betty Botter
      Bought a bit of better butter.


                        WHY DID THE CHILDREN PUT BEANS IN THEIR EARS?

                               "Why did the children
            put beans in their ears
            when the one thing we told the children
            they must not do
            was put beans in their ears?

            "Why did the children
            pour molasses on the cat
            when the one thing we told the children
            they must not do
            was pour molasses on the cat?"


                                                ---CARL SANDBURG


        Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

        I have to tell you this, whoever you are:
   that on one summer morning here, the ocean
   pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
   a south wind, bustling along the shore,
   whipped the froth into little rainbows,
   and a reckless gull swept down the beach
   as if to fly were everything it needed.
   I thought of your hovering saucers,
   looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,   
   so it wouldn't be lost forever---
   that once upon a time we had
   meadows here, and astonishing things,
   swans and frogs and luna moths
   and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
   We could have had them still,
   and welcomed you to earth, but
   we also had the righteous ones
   who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.
   When you go home to your shining galaxy,
   say that what you learned
   from this dead and barren place is
   to beware the righteous ones.

                        Philip Appleman

[Wood Fairy Glenda]

Hi, Poetry Folk -
     In response to Jill's "Golden Retrievals" (which, incidentally, I was unable to hear - Firefox asked me to choose an application to open the file and gave me a list of options from my desktop that made no sense), I sent her a PM with a "Cat Person" poem on the same subject.  She asked me to post it here:

          Sitter of the mat
          Attender of the moment, now,
          Zen master -- the cat.

I also sent to Oli this one:

          Lonely is the child
          In each of us grown old -- Let
          Him laugh and be wild.

There are others that make me smile, like these, written about my ecological restoration work in the woods:

          The old wood-fairy                                 My love slays the wood 
          Moves from tree to tree, spreading           So that other wood may grow --
          Plants and joyful paths.                           Moral dilemma.

     These are all "English Haikus," written by my husband, Carter, during the last months of his life, when he knew he was dying of cancer.  My children put them together in a book for me after his death.  I treasure it, and often go back and read his words - some sad, some funny, some serious and philosophical - but all very much him.

[wind5001]

Thank you so much for sharing, Glenda! 

I do like poetry, there are some great ones by Ko Un, a Korean author (and the Korean author closest to receiving a Nobel Prize for Literature), which I only have in German. I dare not re-translate them...maybe I can find them on the Internet somewhere. Same goes for my favourite German poet: Reiner Kunze...

EDIT: Sometimes, I'm lucky. There are only a few poems in English online, but here is a Ko Un poem that I used in last year's Literary Advent Calendar:

Sunlight

It's absolutely inevitable!
So just take a deep breath
and accept this adversity.
But look!
A distinguished visitor deigns to visit
my tiny north-facing cell.
Not the chief making his rounds, no,
but a ray of sunlight as evening falls,
a gleam no bigger than a screwed-up stamp.
A sweetheart fit to go crazy about.
It settles there on the palm of a hand,
warms the toes of a shyly bared foot.
Then as I kneel and, undevoutly,
offer it a dry, parched face to kiss,
in a moment that scrap of sunlight slips away.
After the guest has departed through the bars,
the room feels several times colder and darker.
This military prison special cell
is a photographer's darkroom.
Without any sunlight I laughed like a fool.
One day it was a coffin holding a corpse.
One day it was altogether the sea.
A wonderful thing!
A few people survive here.

Being alive is a sea
without a single sail in sight.

Source: http://www.koun.co.kr/translation/translation_03.html#

The German translation had a more positive feel about it...interesting to see these nuances in translations. I wish I could understand more Korean.

[wind5001]

Okay,

it is not good, but I tried to give you an impression of the German translation of Ko Un's poem by re-translating it into English (probably the worst of sins in literary circles, but I wanted you to see what the German version sounds like):

The Sunray

All of a sudden I am overjoyed.
I swallow my saliva,
flushing all sadness.
A noble guest is coming to visit me
in my two square meter cell in Block 9 through the North window.
Not the security chief making his rounds,
it is, for a short while in the evening, a hint of sun,
a sunray like paperfolded ttagji.*
I am – oh, first love! – crazy about him!
I take him on my palm,
ashamed, I show him my feet, to warm my toes.
Then, I lay down,
to offer him my leathery face like a heathen.
But unmoved, the spot of light slips away.
As he disappears like this through the iron bars,
it feels so much colder and darker in here –
in military education prison in this hole of darkness.
And no sunray. Hahaha.
One day, it was a coffin for the dead,
another day truly the sea.
Because strangely enough: some got out of here alive.

Even without a single boat with swelling sails:
To be alive, that is the sea.

* Ttagji is an Origami-folded flat paper, which children throw around for games. 

[Peter S]

Oli - I very much preferred your translation of the German translation - more vivid and personal and direct..

[Wood Fairy Glenda]

Me too, Oli!  Your translation made the poetry come alive!