Reflections on Spam

The post that was quoted here has been removed

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Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Beauty was never in the eye
of the beholder,
much rather if anywhere
in the mind’s eye of the beheld.

Could you decode this one?

"The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” ―Marcus Tullius Cicero / "The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” ―Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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The most significant limitation intrinsic to online public forums [including this one] is that people are deprived of gazing into each others' eyes. ~Bob

Originally posted by HandyAndy
Could you decode this one?

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

By Billy Collins (Former Poet Laureate of the United States)

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds. *

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs. *

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

By Archibald MacLeish

Note: With an apology to Kewpie for these somewhat relevant sidebars.