Psalm
by George Oppen

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!


Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass


The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.


Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun


The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

George Oppen

This place destroys the indentations, so if you want to see how it's properly set out, I suggest you google it.

I, Too
[by Langston Hughes]

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed -

I, too, am America

A Thunderstorm in Town
[Thomas Hardy]

She wore a terra-cotta dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the Hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.


Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more

too many to mention -

though Michael Hartnett's, 'Death of an Irishwoman' is excellent

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
all night were neither dogs or cats
but hobgoblin and darkfaced men
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.

She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a cardgame where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child's purse, full of useless things.

Love Letter

Dear love, though I am a hopeless correspondent,
I found your letter habits lacking too
Till I received your card from H.-lulu.
It made me more-than-slightly-less despondent
To see how you transformed your ocean swim
Among dumb bubble-blowers into meters
And daffy rhymes about exotic tweeters
Beyond your balcony at 2 a.m.

I went to bed when you went to Hawaii,
And shut my eyes so tightly I saw stars,
And clenched my sheets like wadded-up memoirs
And made some noise like wah-wah-wah, i.e.,
I find your absence grimly problematic.
The days stack up like empty cardboard boxes
In ever-higher towers of cardboard
Swaying in senseless-lost-time's spooky attic.
I'll give the -atic rhyme another try.
To misconstrue the point-of-view Socratic,
Life is a painful stammered-out emphatic
Pronunciation of the word Goodbye.

Or, as it came out on the telephone,
Sooner-the-better is the way I see it:
Just say, "I guess not"; I'll reply, "So be it."
Beloved, if you throw this dog a bone,
TO readopt the stray-dog metaphor,
I'll keep my vigil till the cows come home.
You'll hear me howling over there in Rome.
I have no explanations, furthermore--
But let me say I've had it up to here
With scrutinizing the inscrutable;
The whys and how-comes of immutable
Unhesitating passion are unclear--

I don't love you because you're good at rhymes,
And not because I think you're not-so-dumb,
I don't love you because you make me come
And come and come innumerable times,
And not for your romantic overcoats,
And not because our friends all say I should,
And not because we wouldn't or we would
Be or not be at one another's throats,
And not because your accent thrills my ear--
Last night you said not "sever" but "severe,"
But then "severe" describes the act "to sever"--
I love you for no reason whatsoever.

And that's the worst, as William S. the Bard
Wrote out in black-and-white while cold-and-hot:
Reasons can be removed, but love cannot.
The comic view insists: Don't take it hard,
But every day I'm pacing up and down
The hallway till I drive my neighbors mad,
And evenings come with what-cannot-be-had
As lights blink on around this boring town,
Whence I unplug the phone and draw the shade
And drink myself half-blind and fantasize
That we're between the sheets, your brilliant eyes
Open me and, bang, we have it make--
When in reality I sit alone
And, staring at my hands, I think "I think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink"
While hating everything I've always known
About how you and I are sunk as well.

Under the aspect of eternity
The world has already ended anyway.
And, without you, my life can go to hell
On roller skates, as far as I'm concerned.
Two things are clear: these quatrains should be burned,
And love is awful, but it leads us to
Our places in the human comedy,
Frescoes of which abound in Italy.
And though I won't be sitting next to you,
I'll take my seat with minimal complaints.
May you sit in the company of saints
And intellectuals and fabulous beauties,
And not forget this constant love of Trude's.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Yearn On.

I want you to feel
the unbearable lack of me.
I want your skin
to yearn for the soft lure of mine;
I want those hints of red
on your canvas
to deepen in passion for me:
carmine, burgundy.
I want you to keep
stubbing your toe
on the memory of me;
I want your head to be dizzy
and your stomach in a spin;
I want you to hear my voice
in your ear, to touch your face
imagining it is my hand.
I want your body to shiver and quiver
at the mere idea of mine.
I want you to feel as though
life after me is dull, and pointless,
and very, very aggrevating,
and that with me you were lifted
on a current you waited all your life to find,
and had despaired of finding,
as though you were wading
through a soggy swill of inanity and ugliness
every minute we are apart.
I want you to drive yourself crazy
with the fantasy of me,
and how we will meet again, against all odds,
and there will be tears and flowers,
and the vast relief of not I,
but us.
I am haunting your dreams,
conducting these fevers
from a distance,
a distance that leaves me weeping,
and storming,
and bereft.


Katie Donovan

Jx

Here's one that pulls on my heart strings and yet uplifts me at the same time.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
with your bitter, twisted lies,
you may trod me in the very dirt
but still, like dust, i'll rise.

Does my sassiness offend you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'cause i walk like i've got oil wells
pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
with the certainty of tides.
Just like hopes springing high
still i'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling like teardrops,
weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'cause i laugh like i've got gold mines
diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
you may cut me with your eyes,
you may kill me with your hatefulness,
but still, like air, i'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
that i dance like i've got diamonds
at the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
welling and swelling, i bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts my ancestors gave.
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise

by Maya Angelou

I'm thoroughly enjoying this thread, although I'd like to see a little more comment from the choosers as to the reasons for their selections. I would agree that everything I've read so far, both the familiar and unfamiliar, are wonderful words that I would kill to be able to write. Also it's a fantastic way to be introduced to poems I would never have read otherwise.

Here are three from me. Not too unfamiliar I guess, and in an unashamedly romantic vein. They are not necessarily my favourites; far too much to choose from for that.

This one I chose for it's simplicity in expressing sadness and loss without drifting into overt sentimentality.

No Road - Philip Larkin

Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect
Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be allowed. A little longer,
And time will be the stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others, is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfillment.
Willing it, my ailment.


This for the unbridled expression and communication of joy and freedom, by someone consumed by a passion for something that most of us will never experience.

High Flight – John Gillespie McGee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The last, purely for it's succinct portrayal of those emotions we encounter on first realising that another person has tipped our emotions over the edge.

After The Lunch – Wendy Cope

On Waterloo Bridge, where we said our goodbyes,
the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I've fallen in love.

On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?

On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.
the head does its best but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I am halfway across.

Yes, OK, I'm a romantic and a dreamer - are those prerequisites for poetry?

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

I cant remember why I like this so much.
He also performs this very well

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=6482

As the Sparrow

To give life you must take life
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward breaking shoals rimmed
with white legged, white bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, i only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.

by
Charles Bukowski.


As poems go

as poems go into thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.

by Charles Bukowski.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
by Dylan Thomas



Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Another of my favourites - a wonderful feast of language from one of the best 20th century poets

I love the ghazal form, although I find it fiendishly difficult to write in...done well, it can be captivating!

This is my favourite ever...but there are loads of others out there.

Ghazal
by Patrick Phillips


Last night I walked in a field. The moon
lit the snow: snow gray as the moon.



And tried to remember your face—Luna Moth,
circling the cold flame of the moon.



At the same moment you looked up, protracting
the old angle: self, secret-love, and the moon.



The earth was young too. But what’s left to say
about youth? What hasn’t been told to the moon?



One circles the other, swirling in a black pool.
Adiós, says the earth. Adieu, says the moon.



And like a child I think: How else would she follow me?
Whenever I turn: your face in the moon.



But love? Love is a coyote snarling your name,
gnawing its leg by the light of the moon.


Jx

(God, I love that poem)