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Favourite poems

Enter here to talk about books, art, literature, film, TV and anything else to do with popular culture.
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Fia
Posts: 5480
Joined: July 6th, 2007, 8:29 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#321 Post by Fia » November 2nd, 2012, 10:39 pm

Latest post of the previous page:

Came across this today:

CATECHISM
We like you; some of our best friends are fools.

You’ve little to embrace, much to forbid;

It seems, alas, that you have made the rules.


Your storied faith all reason ridicules;

False-promise charlatans of quo for quid.

We like you; some of our best friends are fools.



Those rituals, the teachings of your schools,

Faith-justify the wrongs your dogma did;

It seems, alas, that you have made the rules.


Swindlers find the flaws in all our jewels;

When souls come up for sale you always bid.

We like you; some of our best friends are fools.


Your superstitions served as tyrant’s tools;

Behind your crescent, cross or star you hid.

It seems, alas, you always made the rules.


It’s time we put the sifter to the sieve;

We find no fault in faulting, being rid.

It’s time now that we made ourselves new rules;

We, like you. Some of our best friends are fools.



©HANROD (Hank Rodgers)

Maria Mac
Site Admin
Posts: 9306
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:34 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#322 Post by Maria Mac » September 5th, 2013, 7:23 pm

Bump for the dear departed Seamus Heaney. This poem could have been written for my grandfather, a Liverpool docker who hated Catholics (in 1920s Liverpool a day's work for a docker often depended on the religion of the foreman that day), who had a wife and seven children dependent on him and who died of his smoking habit before I was born. My father, his youngest child, remembered him as distant and ill-tempered.

Docker

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

Seamus Heaney

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Lifelinking
Posts: 3248
Joined: July 4th, 2007, 11:56 am

Re: Favourite poems

#323 Post by Lifelinking » September 6th, 2013, 6:36 pm

^^thanks for that one Athena^^

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,

Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.

And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.

The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I've seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,

in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone's inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.

But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.


Irving Layton
"Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice."
William McIlvanney

fiscalli
Posts: 15
Joined: July 27th, 2007, 7:45 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#324 Post by fiscalli » October 6th, 2013, 12:45 am

I never really like Robert Frost until I came cross this one.

Reluctance
BY ROBERT FROST
Out through the fields and the woods
   And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
   And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
   And lo, it is ended.
 
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
   Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
   And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
   When others are sleeping.
 
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
   No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
   But the feet question ‘Whither?’
 
Ah, when to the heart of man
   Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
   To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
   Of a love or a season?

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Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#325 Post by Alan H » October 13th, 2013, 11:50 am

A new poem from the Poet Laureate, Carol Anne Duffy, commenting on topical issues:

22 Reasons For The Bedroom Tax

Because the Badgers are moving the goalposts.
The Ferrets are bending the rules.
The Weasels are taking the hindmost.
The Otters are downing tools.
The Hedgehogs are changing the game-plan
The Grass-snakes are spitting tacks.
The Squirrels are playing the blame-game.
The Skunks are twisting the facts.
The Pole-cats are upping the ante.
The Foxes are jumping the gun.
The Voles are crashing the party.
The Stoats are dismantling the Sun.
The Rabbits are taking the biscuit.
The Hares are losing the plot.
The Eagles are kicking the bucket.
The Rats are joining the dots.
The Herons are throwing a curveball.
The Shrews are fanning the flames.
The Field mice are sinking the 8-ball.
The Swans are passing the blame.
And the Pheasants are draining the oil from the tank-
but only the Bustards have broken the bank.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

Fia
Posts: 5480
Joined: July 6th, 2007, 8:29 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#326 Post by Fia » October 13th, 2013, 8:10 pm

:pointlaugh: :clap:

She emailed it to the Grauniad I believe.

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Lifelinking
Posts: 3248
Joined: July 4th, 2007, 11:56 am

Re: Favourite poems

#327 Post by Lifelinking » October 19th, 2013, 3:11 pm

Excellent
"Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice."
William McIlvanney

Fia
Posts: 5480
Joined: July 6th, 2007, 8:29 pm

Re: Favourite poems

#328 Post by Fia » September 3rd, 2015, 10:19 pm

Appropriate for these dark times:

"HOME," by Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

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