Share a poem

[babybird67]

i think this poem is beautiful. I thought i would share with everyone.

SONNET 116 Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

[Jane Welland]

Jenny, thanks.

That's my favourite sonnet, as it happens!

Yep, great minds think alike, alright!

I'll see if I can find one to put up

Love

Jane x

[Robert]

By AH ;

O wondrous moon with silvery sheen
Who throws his light upon East Cheam
From lofty height and through the mist
Two o'clock Friday chiropodist

[Jane Welland]

Superb...

Cats

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned

To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.

They wait obsequious as darkness
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn

To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot or skinned.
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.

A.S.J.Tessimond



Jane x

[Jane Welland]

And now for something completely different...

I Saw a Jolly Hunter

I saw a jolly hunter
with a jolly gun
Walking in the country
In the jolly sun

In the jolly meadow
sat a jolly hare
saw the jolly hunter
took jolly care


Hunter jolly eager
sight of jolly prey
forgot gun pointing
wrong jolly way


Jolly hunter jolly head
over heels gone
jolly old safety catch
not jolly on!


Bang! went the jolly gun
Hunter jolly dead
Jolly hare got clean away
Jolly good I said!

Charles Causley

Eclectically,

Jane x

[Cap'n Jack]

My absolute favourite:

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)

To S.A.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.
Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a menory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
in the marred shadow
Of your gift.

[Sam Flynn]

Night covers up the rigid land
And ocean's quaking moor,
And shadows, with a gentle hand
The ugly and the poor.
The wounded pride for which I weep
You cannot staunch - nor I
Control the movements of your sleep,
Nor hear whose name you cry;
Whose life is lucky in your eyes,
And precious is the bed
Where, to its utter fancy lies
The dark, caressive head.
For each love to its aim is true,
And each must seek its own;
You love your life, and I love you,
But I must lie alone.
Oh hurry back, then, to the spot
Of your deliberate fall -
For now my dream of you cannot
Refer to you at all.


W.H. Auden

[Graham]

Maybe one of the best pieces ever written:

[Jane Welland]

I love this...

Mervyn Peake

An Old And Crumbling Parapet

An old and crumbling parapet
Arose out of the dancing sea -
And on its top there sat a flea
For reasons which I quite forget,
But as the sun descended, and
The moon uprose across the sky,
We were alone, the flea and I,
And so I took it by the hand

And whispered, 'On your parapet
D'you think that there'd be room for me?'
'I cannot say,' replied the flea,
'I'm studying the Alphabet.'

But that was long ago, and saints
Have died since then - and Ogres bled.
And purple tigers flopped down dead
Among the pictures and the paints.


It speaks to me...

I agree, I am quite odd...

Jane x

[Frank]

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be close to me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

E.E.Cummings

[The Grave Maurice]

By AH ;

O wondrous moon with silvery sheen
Who throws his light upon East Cheam
From lofty height and through the mist
Two o'clock Friday chiropodist

That last line was written by Grizelda Pugh.

[Robert]

Yes indeed.

"Where's the last line of my poem?"

"I rubbed it out to make room for your chiropodist appointment. You know you can't get your boots on if you leave your corns for more than a week."

"Boots! Corns! Symptoms of civilisation. Bare feet in future, striding through the forest."

(The Wild Man Of The Woods)

[babybird67]

i am glad i started this thread...

some absolutely beautiful poems i had never read before...and some funny ones too.

Sam, i love Auden...this is my favourite ever poem...i know the first verse off by heart, i really should learn the rest, but i'd like it read at my funeral.

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

W.H. Auden

[Jane Welland]

In The Night

In The Night

I longed for companionship, rather
But my companions I always wished farther,
And now in the desolate Night,
I think only of the people I should like to bite.

Stevie Smith

Jane x

[Magpie]

Arthur

Arthur should have never married,
He did not like his wife
But when the coppers found her buried
They sent him down for life.

Now Arthur likes his little cell,
And likes the solitude as well