My favourite poetry (2)

good selections our kid! love the christina rosetti poem... i remember delmi lent me a book of her poems... fantastic! What a legend that guy was! Here's to delmi!

Mirror
by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


Sarah xx

I thought I'd sticky this one as the other thread was pretty old!

Anyone else got some favourites to bring to the table?!

Sarah xx

Howl
by Allen Ginsberg  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
 hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
 fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
 starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
 supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
 cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
 staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
 sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
 on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
 wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
 of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
 purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and c*ck and
 endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
 leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
 tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
 enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
 blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
 winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
 mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
 Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
 them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
 all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
 through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
 crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
 to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
 escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
 anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
 brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
 picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
 China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
 ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
 lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
 because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
 who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
 ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
 of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
 soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
 and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
 the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
 fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
 with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
 hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
 of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
 undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
 wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
 the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
 committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
 intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
 waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*cked in the a*s by saintly motorcyclists, and
 screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
 Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
 public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
 ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
 a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
 pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
 of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
 womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her a*s
 and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
 package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
 along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
 a vision of ultimate c*nt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
 sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
 were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
 the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
 secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
 the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
 backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
 with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
 & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
 too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
 sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
 over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
 & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
 waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
 heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
 son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
 be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
 bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
 and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
 build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
 tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
 the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
 of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
 of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
 decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
 were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
 growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
 amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
 ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
 ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
 by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
 away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
 soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
 jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
 street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
 records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
 key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
 and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
 hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
 had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
 & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
 Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
 is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
 tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
 second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
 with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
 sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
 or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
 Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
 their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
 presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
 shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
 neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
 hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
 nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
 resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
 fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
 of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
 echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
 dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
 stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
 tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
 telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
 emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
 rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
 nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
 total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
 of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
 vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
 juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
 images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
 consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
 Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
 you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
 confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
 naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
 what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
 of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
 into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
 the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
 good to eat a thousand years.

The Old Truth
by Benjamin Zephaniah

Rumour has it
Once upon a time
Dere was Peace, Luv an Unity
One race, de Human Race etc,
Africans traded wid de Irish
Chinese traded wid de Arabs etc,
Rumour has it,
We made luv in de open.

Before Religion
Before Politricks,
Our names meant something,
Nu high art,
Nu high brow
Jus a milk and honey scene.

Rumour has it
Jesus (Peace be upon him)
Krishna (Peace be upon him)
Mohammed (Peace be upon him)
Harriet Tubman (Peace be upon him)
Yim Wing Chun (Peace be upon him)
Amina (Peace be upon him)
All came

Rumour has it
Our destinies are all
(Rumour has it)
De same.

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven
William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I love this poem. Truly romantic

Sarah xx

bloody WOW! (to above)

Quote: Tabby

I just got linked to this, as a remedy to "taught" poetry in high schools;

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence!
 Water your damned flower-that Thing, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
 God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
 Oh, that rose has prior claims--
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
 Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together;
 Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
 Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
 Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
 What's the Greek name for "swine's snout"?

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
 Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
 And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
 Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps--
Marked with L. for our initial!
 (He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While Brown Dolores
 Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
 Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
 --Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
 (That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
 Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
 As I do, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
 Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
 While he drains his at one gulp!

Oh, those melons! if he's able
 We're to have a feast; so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
 All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
 Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! And I, too, at such trouble,
 Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,
 Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
 One sure, if another fails;
If I trip him just a-dying,
 Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
 Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel
 On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
 Hand and foot in Belial's gripe;
If I double down the pages
 At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
 Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Or, there's Satan! one might venture
 Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
 As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
 We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . . .
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia
 Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r - you swine!

-Robert Browning.

we did this in my (sadly ex) home school.

The poem in the last post is by Bob Dylan.

oh you mean desolation row