Best Loved Poems

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~Mary Oliver

@hakima

“There’s a certain Slant of light,
on Winter Afternoons
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes,

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are

None may teach it anything
’Tis the Seal Despair
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air

When it comes, the Landscape listens
Shadows hold their breath
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death”

—Emily Dickinson

Hey little bird
With your beak pressed up against the pet store window
There is no bird seed for you today
Only death

@mchill said
@hakima

“There’s a certain Slant of light,
on Winter Afternoons
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes,

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are

None may teach it anything
’Tis the Seal Despair
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air

When it comes, the Landscape listens
Shadows hold their breath
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death”

—Emily Dickinson

@thinkofone said
Hey little bird
With your beak pressed up against the pet store window
There is no bird seed for you today
Only death

No man is an island,
entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

- John Donne

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the reassure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
--Khalil Gibran

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

To you (Kenneth Koch)

Today is special.
Though, I'm not quite sure why.
My love for you is equal to the hours in the day, everyday...
that we share upon this planet.
The small things that you do. I notice.
They say you love me too.
And I'm safe and secure knowing...
that you're the rock upon which I stand.
My granite.

- Wolfe63

@wolfe63 said
Today is special.
Though, I'm not quite sure why.
My love for you is equal to the hours in the day, everyday...
that we share upon this planet.
The small things that you do. I notice.
They say you love me too.
And I'm safe and secure knowing...
that you're the rock upon which I stand.
My granite.

- Wolfe63

Sometime it is about breakup and get hurt too....

A clementine
Of inclement climate
Grows tart.

A crocus
Too stoic to open,
Won’t.

Like an oyster
That cloisters a spoil of pearls,
Untouched—

The heart that’s had
Enough
Stays shut.

Source: Poetry (December 2009) from Heart Touching Poems apknite.

Among School Children
W.B.Yeats
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history.
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year old smiling public man.

II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage -
And had that color upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV
Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocentro finger fashion it
Hallow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I thought never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection of the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
that animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!

A. Rimbaud

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

--Charles Baudelaire

YOU say there is no love, my love,
Unless it lasts for aye!
Oh, folly, there are interludes
Better than the play.

You say lest it endure, sweet love,
It is not love for aye?
Oh, blind! Eternity can be
All in one little day.

—Grace Fallow Norton