Share your favorite poem with me.

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Replies

  • SkateboardFi
    SkateboardFi Posts: 1,322 Member
    O, never say that I was false of heart,
    Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
    As easy might I from my self depart
    As from my soul which in thy breast doth lie.
    That is my home of love; if I have ranged,
    Like him that travels I return again,
    Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
    So that myself bring water for my stain.
    Never believe though in my nature reigned
    All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
    That it could so preposterously be stained
    To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;
    For nothing this wide universe I call
    Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all
    -Shakespeare, Sonnet 109

    (my bf sent me this when we got back together after almost 5 years of being separated)
  • NatalieWiley
    NatalieWiley Posts: 147 Member
    Sister for Sale by Shel Silverstein

    One sister for sale!
    One sister for sale!
    One crying and spying young sister for sale!
    I’m really not kidding,
    So who’ll start the bidding?
    Do I hear the dollar?
    A nickel?
    A penny?
    Oh, isn’t there, isn’t there, isn’t there any
    One kid that will buy this old sister for sale,
    This crying and spying young sister for sale?
  • leynak
    leynak Posts: 963 Member
    Ode

    We are the music-makers,
    And we are the dreamers of dreams,
    Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
    And sitting by desolate streams;
    World-losers and world-forsakers,
    On whom the pale moon gleams:
    Yet we are the movers and shakers
    Of the world for ever, it seems.

    With wonderful deathless ditties
    We build up the world’s great cities,
    And out of a fabulous story
    We fashion an empire’s glory:
    One man with a dream, at pleasure,
    Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
    And three with a new song’s measure
    Can trample an empire down.

    We, in the ages lying
    In the buried past of the earth,
    Built Nineveh with our sighing,
    And Babel itself with our mirth;
    And o’erthrew them with prophesying
    To the old of the new world’s worth;
    For each age is a dream that is dying,
    Or one that is coming to birth.

    Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-1881)
    - I plan on getting at tattoo with the first 2 lines when I meet my goal :smile:

    I also like Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe
  • sunkisses
    sunkisses Posts: 2,365 Member
    Homage to My Hips by Lucille Clifton

    these hips are big hips.
    they need space to
    move around in.
    they don't fit into little
    petty places. these hips
    are free hips.
    they don't like to be held back.
    these hips have never been enslaved,
    they go where they want to go
    they do what they want to do.
    these hips are mighty hips.
    these hips are magic hips.
    i have known them
    to put a spell on a man and
    spin him like a top
  • sunkisses
    sunkisses Posts: 2,365 Member
    forgiving my father by Lucille Clifton

    it is friday. we have come
    to the paying of the bills.
    all week you have stood in my dreams
    like a ghost, asking for more time
    but today is payday, payday old man;
    my mother's hand opens in her early grave
    and i hold it out like a good daughter.

    there is no more time for you. there will
    never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher
    old liar. i wish you were rich so i could take it all
    and give the lady what she was due
    but you were the only son of a needy father,
    the father of a needy son;
    you gave her all you had
    which was nothing. you have already given her
    all you had.

    you are the pocket that was going to open
    and come up empty any friday.
    you were each other's bad bargain, not mine.
    daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man
    what am i doing here collecting?
    you lie side by side in debtors' boxes
    and no accounting will open them up.
  • NVintage
    NVintage Posts: 1,463 Member
    With Flowers in our Hands
    by John Cowper Powys

    COME let us walk thro' their burning hell
    With flowers in our hands!
    With flowers in our hands let us walk there,
    And see what power that evil air,
    That evil air and those burning hours,
    Have to hurt us who carry flowers!
  • ___Soundwave___
    ___Soundwave___ Posts: 1,190 Member
    Kubla Khan
    BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
    Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
    So twice five miles of fertile ground
    With walls and towers were girdled round;
    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

    But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
    A savage place! as holy and enchanted
    As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced:
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
    And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.
    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
    And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war!
    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
    It was a miracle of rare device,
    A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw:
    It was an Abyssinian maid
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
    That with music loud and long,
    I would build that dome in air,
    That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
    And all who heard should see them there,
    And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
    His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
    Weave a circle round him thrice,
    And close your eyes with holy dread
    For he on honey-dew hath fed,
    And drunk the milk of Paradise.
  • Motorsheen
    Motorsheen Posts: 20,508 Member

    Dark and lonely on the summer night.

    Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

    Watchdog barking - Do he bite?

    Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

    Slip in his window,

    Break his neck!

    Then his house

    I start to wreck!

    Got no reason --

    What the heck!

    Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

    C-I-L-L ...

    My land - lord ...
  • nossmf
    nossmf Posts: 12,057 Member
    I first learned of this poem when S.E. Hinton quoted it in The Outsiders, but it's the only poem I have ever memorized for myself (not counting poems memorized for school and subsequently forgotten...)

    Nature's first green is gold,
    Her hardest hue to hold.
    Her early leaf's a flower;
    But only so an hour.
    Then leaf subsides to leaf,
    So Eden sank to grief,
    So dawn goes down to day.
    Nothing gold can stay.

    - Robert Frost
  • J_NY_Z
    J_NY_Z Posts: 2,540 Member
    The Charge of the Light Brigade
    BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

    I
    Half a league, half a league,
    Half a league onward,
    All in the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.
    “Forward, the Light Brigade!
    Charge for the guns!” he said.
    Into the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.

    II
    “Forward, the Light Brigade!”
    Was there a man dismayed?
    Not though the soldier knew
    Someone had blundered.
    Theirs not to make reply,
    Theirs not to reason why,
    Theirs but to do and die.
    Into the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.

    III
    Cannon to right of them,
    Cannon to left of them,
    Cannon in front of them
    Volleyed and thundered;
    Stormed at with shot and shell,
    Boldly they rode and well,
    Into the jaws of Death,
    Into the mouth of hell
    Rode the six hundred.

    IV
    Flashed all their sabres bare,
    Flashed as they turned in air
    Sabring the gunners there,
    Charging an army, while
    All the world wondered.
    Plunged in the battery-smoke
    Right through the line they broke;
    Cossack and Russian
    Reeled from the sabre stroke
    Shattered and sundered.
    Then they rode back, but not
    Not the six hundred.

    V
    Cannon to right of them,
    Cannon to left of them,
    Cannon behind them
    Volleyed and thundered;
    Stormed at with shot and shell,
    While horse and hero fell.
    They that had fought so well
    Came through the jaws of Death,
    Back from the mouth of hell,
    All that was left of them,
    Left of six hundred.

    VI
    When can their glory fade?
    O the wild charge they made!
    All the world wondered.
    Honour the charge they made!
    Honour the Light Brigade,
    Noble six hundred!