Post your favorite "SHORT" poem

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

that is my favorite frost poem!

Plic, plac, plouche,
il pleut, il pleut, il douche

Baudelaire

Another of my favourite war poems:

On Passing the New Menin Gate
Siegfried Sassoon, 1886-1967

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,--
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient hold its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever,' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

(There are 54,889 names engraved on the Gate.)

Ramie's day

Conceived in covenant.
Formed by mighty hands in the darkness.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.
What joy and wonder as she arrives Little hands and feet, a smile so sweet.
With pain and sorrow a troubled heart, a year, a week, a day or two.
Now she is on streets of gold. In the nail pierced hands.
No pain or sorrow can touch her now.
She waits with him for others coming.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.

Kelly

Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker

Whene'er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away
My thoughts, as I sit there and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey:
It teaches me that very like
Am I myself unto my pipe.

Like me this pipe, so fragrant burning,
Is made of naught but earthen clay;
To earth I too shall be returning,
And cannot halt my slow decay.
My well used pipe, now cracked and broken,
Of mortal life is but a token.

No stain, the pipe's hue yet doth darken;
It remains white. Thus do I know
That when to death's call I must harken
My body, too, all pale will grow.
To black beneath the sod 'twill turn,
Likewise the pipe, if oft it burn.

Or when the pipe is fairly glowing,
Behold then instantaneously,
The smoke off into thin air going,
'Til naught but ash is left to see.
Man's fame likewise away will burn
And unto dust his body turn.

How oft it happens when one's smoking,
The tamper's missing from it's shelf,
And one goes with one's finger poking
Into the bowl and burns oneself.
If in the pipe such pain doth dwell
How hot must be the pains of Hell!

Thus o'er my pipe in contemplation
Of such things - I can constantly
Indulge in fruitful meditation,
And so, puffing contentedly,
On land, at sea, at home, abroad,
I smoke my pipe and worship God.

--Johann Sebastian Bach

I've always loved this:

i am so glad and very

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i

ee cummings

Airline to Heaven

There’s an airline plane
Flies to Heaven every day
Past them pearly gates
If you want to ride this train
Have your ticket in your hand
Before it is too late.

If the world looks wrong
And your money’s spent and gone
And your friend has turned away
You can get away to Heaven
On this aeroplane
Just bow your head and pray.

Them’s got ears let them hear
Them’s got eyes let them see
Turn Your Eyes to the Lord of the skies
Take that airline Plane
It will Take You Home again.
Yes, to your home beyond the skies.

Well, a lot of people guess
Some say no and some say Yes
Will it take some and leave some behind?
But you will surely know
When to the airport go
To leave this world behind

Oh, a lot of speakers speak
And a lot of preachers preach
When you lay their salary on the line
But to bow your head and pray
Is the only earthly way
That you can fly to Heaven on time.
That you can reach Heaven on time.

Your ticket you obtain
On this heavenly airline plane
You leave your sins behind
You have got to take this flight
Might be daytime, might be night,
But you can’t see your way if you’re blind.

~ Woody Guthrie

If Death Is Not The End

If death is not the end, I'd like to know what is.

For all eternity we don't exist,
except for now.
In my gumshoe mac, I shuffled to the clifftop,
Stood well back,
and struck a match to light my life;
And as it flared it fell in darkness
Lighting nothing but itself.

I saw my life fall and thought:
Well, kiss my physics!
Time is over, or it's not,
But this I know:
Life passes through us like the blade
Of bamboo growing through the prisoner pegged down in the glade
It pierces your blood, you screaming head -
Life is what happened to the dead.

Forever we do not exist
Except for now.
Life passes through us like a beam
Of charcoal green - a golden gleam,
The opposite of how it seems:
It's not you that goes through life
– life is the knife that cuts your dream
Around the seam
And leaves you turned on in the stream, laughing with your mouth open,
Until the stream is gone,
Leaving you cracked mud,
Not even there to be absent,
From the heartbeat of a dying fish.

In bed, upstairs, I feel your pulse run with the clock
And reach your hand
And lock us with our fingers
As if we were bumping above the Pole.
Yet I know by dawn
Your hand will be dry bone
I'll have slept through your goodbye,no matter how long I wake.

Life winds on,
Through Cheri and Karl who can no longer smell chocolate,
Or see with wonder wind inflate the sail,
Or answer mail

Life flies on
Through Katy who was Catherine but is bound for Kate
Who looks over her shoulder at the demon Azmodeus,
And sees the Daily Mail

(I clutch my purse. I had it just now.)

Life slices through
The frozen butter in the Alpine wreck.

(I found your photo upside down
I never kissed a girl so long,
So long, so lovely or so wrong)

Life is what kills you in the end
And I can cry
But you won't be there to be sorry
You were made of life

For ever we did not exist
We woke and for a second kissed.

~ Robyn Hitchcock

Wit in fools has something shocking
Like cabhorses galloping.

The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes
About life and death and other tuppenny aches.

Better on your arse than on your feet,
Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

Live and clean forget from day to day,
Mop life up as fast as it dribbles away.

Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought
Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.

Hope is a knave befools us evermore,
Which till I lost no happiness was mine.
I strike from hell's to grave on heaven's door:
All hope abandon ye who enter in.

sleep till death
healeth
come ease
this life disease

how hollow heart and full
of filth thou art

-- Samuel Beckett, 'Long After Chamfort'

(a sequence of short poems for your delectation)

Im Nebel

Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Einsam ist jeder Busch und Stein,
Kein Baum sieht den andern,
Jeder ist allein.

Voll von Freunden war mir die Welt,
Als noch mein Leben licht war;
Nun, da der Nebel fällt,
Ist keiner mehr sichtbar.

Wahrlich, keiner ist weise,
Der nicht das Dunkel kennt,
Das unenntrinnbar und leise
Von allen ihn trennt.

Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Leben ist Einsamsein.
Kein Mensch kennt den andern,
Jeder ist allein.

-Hermann Hesse

Originally posted by nihilismor
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out o ...[text shortened]... Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth

my favorite small poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89): Pied Beauty I love the imagery and the use of language. It is lovely when read aloud and shared with someone. Enjoy it now......

Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Daffodils
(William Wordsworth, 1770-1850)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

I like this one better than the "All the world's a stage" speech. from the same play:

Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing:
I would not change it.

William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
(As You Like It: Act II, Sc. 1)