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Poetry

Enter here to talk about books, art, literature, film, TV and anything else to do with popular culture.
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Manuel
Posts: 184
Joined: October 29th, 2009, 8:59 pm

Re: Poetry

#21 Post by Manuel » October 24th, 2014, 1:53 pm

Latest post of the previous page:

End of the pier, end of the bay
You tug my arm, and say : "Give in to lust,
Give up to lust, oh heaven knows we'll soon be dust ... "

I could have been wild and I could have been free
But nature played this trick on me

She wants it now, and she will not wait
But she's too rough, and I'm too delicate

User avatar
jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#22 Post by jaywhat » April 19th, 2015, 8:39 am

Been reading 'Vanishing Lung Syndrome' a book of poems by Miroslav Holub. Here is the first one in it :-


1751

That year Diderot began to publish his Encyclopaedia,
and the first insane asylum was founded in London.
So the counting out began, to separate the sane, who
veil themselves in words, fron the insane, who rip off
feathers from their bodies.
Poets had to learn tightrope-walking.
And to make sure, officious types began to publish
instructions on how to be normal.

User avatar
jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#23 Post by jaywhat » April 22nd, 2015, 8:16 am

Here's another one I like very much:-

What Else

What else to do
but with a stick
drive a small dog
out of yourself?

Scruff bristling with fright
he huddles against the wall,
crawls in the domestic zodiac,
limps,
bleeding from the muzzle.

He would eat out of your hand
but that’s no use.

What else
is poetry
but killing that small dog
in yourself?

And all around the barking, barking,
the hysterical barking
of cats.

User avatar
Dave B
Posts: 17809
Joined: May 17th, 2010, 9:15 pm

Re: Poetry

#24 Post by Dave B » September 17th, 2015, 8:06 am

I am just one
Standing alone
Not very long
Yet not too terse
I am just a uni-verse.

Me, just now
"Look forward; yesterday was a lesson, if you did not learn from it you wasted it."
Me, 2015

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jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#25 Post by jaywhat » September 17th, 2015, 10:39 am

like it, Dave

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

Re: Poetry

#26 Post by Alan H » October 8th, 2015, 7:31 pm

It's National Poetry Day!

This from Twitter:
There was a young man
From Bath who got limericks
And haikus confused
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?

thundril
Posts: 3607
Joined: July 4th, 2008, 5:02 pm

Re: Poetry

#27 Post by thundril » November 8th, 2015, 10:11 am

For today. . .
Futility, by Wlfred Owen

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

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

Re: Poetry

#28 Post by Maria Mac » May 28th, 2016, 10:11 pm

I've just come across this one for the first time in my life.


Dreams
Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

User avatar
jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#29 Post by jaywhat » May 29th, 2016, 5:45 am

I like it.

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jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#30 Post by jaywhat » March 26th, 2017, 6:57 am

world poetry day

because its world poetry day
I shall either write a poem, or not
a poem which rhymes – or not

but if its world pottery day
I’ll either make a jug that
rhymes or not – or a pot

he was well into pottery
so a saucer by Chaucer
was all the rage
he was a sage
really into spice
very nice

it is word poetry day
so pictures are not wanted
on world pottery day
pitchers are wanted

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

Re: Poetry

#31 Post by Alan H » March 26th, 2017, 9:44 am

:laughter: Fantastic!
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?

User avatar
animist
Posts: 6522
Joined: July 30th, 2010, 11:36 pm

Re: Poetry

#32 Post by animist » March 31st, 2017, 11:34 am

I don't think I like poetry
It forces me to put my thoughts in clever niches
And thereby robs them of their
Meaning and testability.

Maybe
Though
This
Is
Itself
A Poem

Cairsley
Posts: 28
Joined: July 4th, 2014, 2:25 am

Re: Poetry

#33 Post by Cairsley » August 13th, 2017, 8:31 pm

One of my old favorites. It suits a humanist feeling (perhaps enjoying) a touch of melancholy.


Stanzas


Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

~ Emily Brontë ~

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jaywhat
Posts: 15807
Joined: July 5th, 2007, 5:53 pm

Re: Poetry

#34 Post by jaywhat » August 13th, 2017, 9:32 pm

one I wrote recently


ploughman by reservoir

I am a boy from the heart of Hertfordshire
son of a businessman who delivered coal
dug out of mines from all over but mainly up north
with ancestors who toiled from school age
at all hours for a mere pittance
a mother who had her own motorbike in the 1930s
driving round the villages to do people’s hair
then had a salon, ‘Evelyn’s, in Stevenage High Street
past the White Lion and next to Fishy Furr’s

I am not much of a farmer, little connection with the land
but I do like a ploughman’s and Bakewell tart, served by Pritibha
then over the Pennines to the road from Penistone to Manchester
now sitting by Winscar Reservoir feeding the ducks and geese
with handfuls of seeds bought for our birdfeeders at home

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