Got Poetry?

[Coccinelle]

We reach out for You
but You are gone
We hold You in Our minds
like We once did...in Our arms

We send You candles
if You are in a dark place
they burn bright with Our love
they will never go out

We wait for You
here in Your home
Your place is set
the table is ready

We try to understand
If You need time
We dont care where You have been
We wont judge

We just want to hold You
smell You
touch Your face
like when You were newborn

Close Our eyes tight
wish
only to open them
to stare at an empty space

Our souls ache for You
We are incomplete
but...We will be here
when You are ready

We reach out for You
but You are gone
we hold You in our minds
like We once did in Our arms


-Shawn Davison

[popeye]

Thank you, Louise

[Ginger]

My daughter writes poetry alot, some are just alright, but some are quite good. This morning I read this one that she left for me to read, and it made me cry. I thought it was very well done for a girl of just 13, who has been through a lot of emotional stuff lately, and I thought I'd share it.

Unexplainable

Memory is like a tear on your face
Don't know where it came from
Don't know where it's gonna' go
But after time it's gone 'cause you wipe it away
to be passed on to another in another way
Putting pieces together inside your mind
to figure out what's going on all the time
But you can't because the world is always changing,
Never stays the same.
The current problem's now the past, the future is our biggest chance

'Cause your mind is revolving
like the earth on it's axel, spinning
round and round finding center ground
and time has no relevance 'cause there's not enough of it
so get done what you can while you're alive.

The future is unexplainable, unnatainable, magical,
no...it's bland.

[melliedee]

Originally Posted by Ginger

My daughter writes poetry alot, some are just alright, but some are quite good. This morning I read this one that she left for me to read, and it made me cry. I thought it was very well done for a girl of just 13, who has been through a lot of emotional stuff lately, and I thought I'd share it.

Unexplainable

Memory is like a tear on your face
Don't know where it came from
Don't know where it's gonna' go
But after time it's gone 'cause you wipe it away
to be passed on to another in another way
Putting pieces together inside your mind
to figure out what's going on all the time
But you can't because the world is always changing,
Never stays the same.
The current problem's now the past, the future is our biggest chance

'Cause your mind is revolving
like the earth on it's axel, spinning
round and round finding center ground
and time has no relevance 'cause there's not enough of it
so get done what you can while you're alive.

The future is unexplainable, unnatainable, magical,
no...it's bland.

Oh, what a last line! Pretty sophisticated for a 13 year-old.

[Ginger]

Originally Posted by melliedee

Oh, what a last line! Pretty sophisticated for a 13 year-old.

Thanks! Yah, I thought the last line was quite a kicker.

[Tony&Cheri]

Cosmo inspired me on this forum to read some more poems by Leonard Cohen. I bought the "Book of Longing" which has a lot of poems about Cohens experience of returning to the "real world" after five years as a Buddhist monk at the Mt. Baldy Abbey in California. This is one I liked:

Early Morning On Mt. Baldy ~ Leonard Cohen

Alarm awakened me at 2:30 am:
got into my robes
kimono and hakama
modelled after the 12th century
archer's costume:
on top of this the koroma
a heavy outer garment
with impossibly long sleeves:
on top of this the ruksu
a kind of patchwork bib
which incorporates an ivory disc:
and finally the four foot
serpentine belt
that twists into a huge handsome knot
resembling a braided challah
and covers the bottom of the ruksu:
all in all
about twenty pounds of clothing
which I put on quickly
at 2:30 a.m.
over my enormous hard-on.

[Cosmo]

Thanks T, here's one back...

From "The Energy of Slaves"


I perceived the outline of your breasts
through your Hallowe'en costume
I knew you were falling in love with me
because no other man could perceive
the advance of your bosom into his imagination
It was a rupture of your unusual modesty
for me and me alone
through which you impressed upon my shapeless hunger
the incomparable and final outline of your breasts
like two deep fossil shells
which remained all night long and probably forever

[Cosmo]

Since you got me started...

I Long to Hold Some Lady from The Spice Box of Earth
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.

There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady's bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:


As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.


Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.


But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.


peace

[Cosmo]

From Lawrence Ferlinghetti...circa 1955

Not like Dante
Discovering a commedia
Upon the slopes of heaven
I would paint a different kind
of Paradiso
in which the people would be naked
as they always are
in scenes like that
because it is supposed to be
a painting in their souls
but there would be no anxious angels telling them
how heaven is
the perfect picture of
a monarchy
and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below
in which I might have stepped
nor any altars in the sky except
fountains of imagination

[melliedee]

This is a wee bit religious, but isn't the language beautiful?


Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

7. God’s Grandeur


THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

[Tony&Cheri]

For his morning tea
a priest sits down
in utter silence-
Confronted by chrysanthemums.

~ Matsuo Basho

[Tony&Cheri]

The Snake ~ D.H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

[popeye]

"The Snake" I like it!! I like it a lot! Speaks volumes (or did to me) of human nature.
Thanks T & C

[Coccinelle]

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

[Tony&Cheri]

I found this poem recently in a collection of lectures by Reb Anderson. The lecture given which included the reading of this poem was suitably on Father's Day. Anderson suggested it spoke to fathers, sons and the small child hidden within all of us.

Papa T


This is a poem to my son Peter by Peter Meinke

This is a poem to my son Peter
whom I have hurt a thousand times
whose large and vulnerable eyes
have glazed in pain at my ragings
thin wrists and fingers hung
boneless in despair, pale freckled back
bent in defeat, pillow soaked
by my failure to understand.
I have scarred through weakness
and impatience your frail confidence forever
because when I needed to strike
you were there to hurt and because
I thought you knew
you were beautiful and fair
your bright eyes and hair
but now I see that no one knows that
about himself, but must be told
and retold until it takes hold
because I think anything can be killed
after awhile, especially beauty
so I write this for life, for love, for
you, my oldest son Peter, age 10,
going on 11.


.

[Cuff]

VERY nice T~!

Uh...BTW - NO ONE can hold a pause for effect longer than Reb Anderson.