ABC of Famous Poets

[lucimay]

i can't remember if i've gotten Y before and if i have i probably posted this before but i can't be bothered to check so...

Yeats, William Butler



The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[danlo]

Zephaniah, Benjamin (I know scary last name for the Watch! )


Dis Poetry
Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed
It gets into me dreadlocks
It lingers around me head

[sgt.null]

Kelli Russell Agodon



In the 70’s, I Confused Macramй and Macabre

I.
I wanted the macabre plant holder
hanging in Janet and Chrissy’s apartment.
My friend said her cousin tried to kill himself
by putting his head through the patterns
of in his mother’s spiderplant hanger, but
the hook broke from the ceiling and he fell
knocking over their lava lamp, their 8-track player.
His brother almost died a week later when
he became tangled in the milfoil at Echo Lake.
I said it could have been a very
macramй summer for that family.

II.
When I looked outside for sticks to make a God’s Eye
to hang my bedroom wall, I found a mouse
flattened, its white spine stretching past its tail.
And a few feet away from that,
a dead bird with an open chest.
Its veins wrapped tightly together.
This neighborhood with its macramй details
crushed into the street. I wanted
my mother to console me, remind me
that sometimes we escape.
But when I returned to my house
it was empty, except for the macabre owl
my mother had almost finished, its body left
on the kitchen table, while she ran out to buy more beads.

[deer of the dawn]

Borrow, George

O thou, who, ’mid the forest trees,
With thy harmonious trembling strain,
Could’st change at once to soothing ease,
My love-sick bosom’s cruel pain:
Thou droop’st in dreary silence now,
With shiver’d frame, and broken string,
While here, unhelp’d, beneath the bough
I sit, and feebly strive to sing.

The moon no more illumes the ground;
In night and vapour dies my lay;
For with thy sweet and melting sound
Fled, all at once, her silver ray:
O soon, O soon, shall this sad heart,
Which beats so low, and bleeds so free,
O’ercome by its fell load of smart,
Be broke, O ruin’d harp, like thee!

[sgt.null]

Anastasia Clark




Jigsaw Puzzles and You

There were long hyphens in our day-
When no one spoke; no one exhaled

As we contemplated the broken puzzles-
The broken tiles all over the floor

Some might have called us mad-
Insane- in this ceramic nightmare

Of yoga knees and bloody feet-
Empty bottles scattered on a garden mat

And still we persevered-
With our buckets of glue and fingers of paste

Figuring how to fit ourselves into this chaos-
Of porcelain folly and jaded beliefs

This irksome chaos of so-called matrimony-
This well-earned puzzle that some call LOVE.

[ussusimiel]

Dickinson, Emily

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true—
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe—

The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

[lucimay]

i was waiting for the E so i could post max! sarge, your work reminds me very much of the dadaists and surrealists and max was part of that movement. (a very big part)
it's very hard to find any of his poetry online!
(mostly you find his paintings)



Ernst, Max




excerpt from La femme 100 têtes, as translated from the French and reproduced in View magazine in (I think?) 1940


The night howls in its hiding-place and approaches our eyes like wounded flesh.
A door opens itself backwards by the night of silence. A bodiless body places himself parallel to his body and shows us - like a phantomless phantom with particular saliva - the matrix for postage stamps. Two bodiless bodies place themselves parallel to their bodies, falling out of beds and curtains - like phantomless phantoms...

...To evoke the seventh age which succeeds the ninth birth, Germinal of the invisible eyes, the moon and Loplop trace ovals with their heads. At this moment the phantoms enter a period of voracity. Sometimes naked, sometimes clad in thin jets of fire, they make the geysers spout with the probability of bloodrain and with the vanity of the dead. To the glamour of their scales they prefer the dust of carpets, to the masturbation of fresh leaves, the pious lies. But they escape with fear as soon as the rumbling of drums is heard under the water. They pick up some dry crackers in the hollows of the giant's causeway. The giant's causeway is a pile of cradles...

[ussusimiel]

Francis Ledwidge

A Soldier's Grave

Then in the lull of midnight, gentle arms
Lifted him slowly down the slopes of death
Lest he should hear again the mad alarms
Of battle, dying moans, and painful breath.

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made
A grave for him that he might better rest.
So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed,
And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest.

[EDIT: to fix typo.]

[sgt.null]

9luci9 - thanks for the ernst.




On A Cape May Warbler Who Flew Against My Window

She's stopped in her southern tracks
Brought haply to this hard knock
When she shoots from the tall spruce
And snaps her neck on the glass.

From the fall grass I gather her
And give her to my silent children
Who give her a decent burial
Under the dogwood in the garden.

They lay their gifs in the grave:
Matches, a clothes-peg, a coin;
Fire paper for her, sprinkle her
With water, fold earth over her.

She is out of her element forever
Who was air's high-spirited daughter;
What guardian wings can I conjure
Over my own young, their migrations?

The children retreat indoors.
Shadows flicker in the tall spruce.
Small birds flicker like shadows--
Ghosts come nest in my branches.

[ussusimiel]

Marilyn Hacker

Maybe it was jet lag, maybe not,
but I was smoking in the kitchen: six,
barely, still dark: beyond the panes, a mix
of summer storm and autumn wind. I got
back to you; have I got you back? What
warmed me wasn’t coffee, it was our
revivified combustion. In an hour,
gray morning, but I’d gone back to my spot
beside you, sleeping, where we’d stayed awake
past exhaustion, talking, after, through
the weeks apart, divergent times and faces.
I fell asleep, skin to warm skin, at daybreak.
Your breasts, thighs, shoulders, mouth, voice, are the places
I live, whether or not I live with you.

[ussusimiel]

Rashidah Ismaili

O Lagos, Lagos, ah say, you don tyah
fo dis? Yousef wey you de com fom?
Me, I long for the cleanliness of
sand roads that breathe long in carefully
spaced intervals between cars running
wild like mustangs roaming the plains.
There are no drivers to speak of.
They have vanished over the hills and
into gulleys.

[deer of the dawn]

A Blessing
by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

[sgt.null]

Bob Kaufman



O-Jazz-O

Where the string
At
some point,
Was umbilical jazz,
Or perhaps,
In memory,
A long lost bloody cross,
Buried in some steel cavalry.
In what time
For whom do we bleed,
Lost notes, from some jazzman's
Broken needle.
Musical tears from lost
Eyes.
Broken drumsticks, why?
Pitter patter, boom dropping
Bombs in the middle
Of my emotions
My father's sound
My mother's sound,
Is love,
Is life.

[deer of the dawn]

James Russell Lowell

No price is set on the lavish summer,
June may be had by the poorest comer.

[sgt.null]

Edna St. Vincent Millay



Modern Declaration by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having
wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the
rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these
loves;
Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having
grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of those loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a
conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink
Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers of
their alert enemies; declare

That I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied
interests wins the war;
Shall love you always.

[ussusimiel]

Neruda, Pablo

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

[sgt.null]

Charles Olson



Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]

I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed


To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it fell to the sea


I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then



This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this


is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,


Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle


It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions


of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming


from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of


more than I am



There is no strict personal order


for my inheritance.



No Greek will be able


to discriminate my body.


An American


is a complex of occasions,


themselves a geometry


of spatial nature.



I have this sense,


that I am one


with my skin


Plus this—plus this:


that forever the geography


which leans in


on me I compell


backwards I compell Gloucester


to yield, to


change


Polis


is this

[ussusimiel]

Sylvia Plath

Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

[sgt.null]

Nizar Qabbani (1923 - 1998)



Light Is More Important Than The Lantern

Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
The are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty
And my madness.

[Cord Hurn]

Roxman, Susanna

TROY


When they tell you it’s only a myth,
don’t believe them.
When they say, oh yes, it does exist,
but as a relatively late settlement,
some vulgar Hellenistic town
shallowly buried in rough ground,
an unmade bed under a coverlet,
don’t suppose it’s all.

Schliemann came to this hill
in order to show that his boyhood
and Homeric Troy had both been real.

His proof of the child was identified
with knife blades of silver, spear tips of bronze
(their shafts had reverted to earth),
with soft gold calmly insisting
on feathery diadems like owls.

Ironically, the hoard was preheroic.

Missing Homer’s tough city,
Schliemann found and founded his own.

Death, the tall duchess patiently waiting at Naples,
seemed trivial once he’d seen
that briskly successful businessman
becoming a mere negation, a husk,
concealing a robust boy.

Troy turned out to be many-layered,
a lavish birthday cake.
That level where Schliemann stood face to face
with himself at last had been burnt,
its rich crunchy texture containing
charcoal, blackened bricks, bones.

Each Troy is always liable to fall.

But don’t suppose this is all.
You’ll have to plunge deeper,
descend even steeper paths
past dark blue strata, millennia,
and forget that sleekness of weapons,
those conveniences of wealth.

You’ll want to plummet gently
but unerringly like amber in water
down to the first Troy, a slow
forgotten village where people
kept goats and gathered green walnuts
and nothing much ever happened,

get back to before the beginning, transcend
eras of flaming cities
or stupid adulthood.