Fawn's Foster-Mother-Robinson Jeffers

[butathinsilence.livejournal.com]

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.
Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun
And saying that when she was first married
She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.
(It is empty now, the roof has fallen
But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods
Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;
The place is now more solitary than ever before.)
"When I was nursing my second baby
My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake
And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast
Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.
Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,
Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.
I had more joy from that than from the others."
Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road
With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.
She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin
Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,
I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,
The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

from New Canadian Poetry, 2000

[youfuckingbitch.livejournal.com]

late september pear

She said,
but is his voice music to you

I said
his skin is the sweet of late september pear

yes, but is his voice music to you

I said, his skin is the sweet of
late september pear, and kissing him
is like kissing silence and if
music is very, very, very good at
the very end you can feel
its silence inside your body.

- mary elizabeth grace

<3

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

Love in the Asylum
by: Dylan Thomas

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

a new one to me!

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

'Invictus',
by William Ernest Henley


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

(no subject)

[shibaiko.livejournal.com]

First, a poem, as this is a poetry community...

Introduction to Poetry, Billy Collins

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.

and second, ( a suggestion as to the recent trolling problem... )

Keep Your Promise by Mirabai

[svggrdnbeauty.livejournal.com]

Keep Your Promise


Take my arm
and keep up your promise!
They call you the refugeless refuge,
they call you redeemer of outcasts.
Caught in a riptide
in the sea of becoming,
without your support I'm a shipwreck!
You reveal yourself age after age
and free the beggar
from her affliction.

Dark One, Mira is clutching your feet,
at stake is your honor!



- Mirabai

fine! I'll use an "LJ cut"! sheesh!

[anne-bradstreet.livejournal.com]

( Separation by W.S. Merwin )

On the other end of the spectrum...

[epiclevelregina.livejournal.com]

"Fleas"
by Ogden Nash

Adam
had 'em.

A Certain Lady - Dorothy Parker

[angabel.livejournal.com]

A Certain Lady

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.

- Dorothy Parker

An Earlier Master

[cluegirl.livejournal.com]

An Earlier Master
By Patrick Woodroffe

Don't trust a painting more than any memory;
And never blame an artist's brain and eyes
For twisting truth like some distorting camera,
Conspiring with his paints to offer lies.

Should he rebuke his erring hand and vision,
The subtle disobedience of his quill,
When beauty's got by half-restraining chaos,
By partly breaking happy hazard's will

When joy's the only force that lifts his pallette,
Where love alone directs his curious hands
To fix in paint a dream that lasts forever,
And set his painted foot in mythic lands?

The purest art were canvas left unblemished
The paper unpolluted by the word;
So if my heirs prefer an earlier Master,
May all my works to whiteness be restored!

---

Patrick Woodroffe is a stunning visual artist as well as a poet. Here's his words on how this poem came about:

"No doubt hoping for possible sudden wealth, my son once suggested -- I hope he was joking! -- that we should strip the paint from one of my pictures in order to find out, as he put it, 'whether there's a real work of art underneath.' I suppose he had hopes of a priceless unknown Rembrandt! Anyway, I can assure him and anyone who may possess one of my paintings that the only images hidden my mine are of such conceptual minimalism as to merit only Whistlerian titles such as "Composition in White" or "Symphony in White."
And Oh! How perfect those pictures are!"

Sophia De Mello Breyner - Day of Sea

[waterlilies-.livejournal.com]

Day of sea in the sky, made
From shadows and horses and plumes.

Day of sea in my room – cube
Where my sleepwalker’s movements slide
Between animal and flower, like medusas.

Day of sea in the sea, high day
Where my gestures are seagulls who lose themselves
Spiraling over the clouds, over the spume.

(no subject)

[greenhoodloxley.livejournal.com]

Barter-
by Sarah Teasdale.


Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Take the I Out - Sharon Olds

[pourquoi-pas.livejournal.com]

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

Water Picture by May Swenson

[waterlilies-.livejournal.com]

Water Picture

In the pond in the park
all things are doubled:
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.

( by May Swenson )

(no subject)

[blue-lightning.livejournal.com]

First Memory
Louise Gluck

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was--
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Jon Anderson

The Parachutist

Then the air was perfect. And his descent
to the white earth slowed.
                              Falling
became an ability to rest--as

the released breath
believes in life. Further down it snowed,

a confusion of slow novas
which his shoes touched upon, which seemed
as he fell by

to be rising. From every
small college and rural town:
     the clearest, iced blossoms of thought,

but gentle.
               Then the housetops
of friends, who
he thought had been speaking of his arrival,
withdrew, each from another.

He saw that his friends
lived in a solitude they had not ever said aloud.

Strangely he thought this good.

          The world, in fact,
which in these moments he came toward,

seemed casual.
Had he been thinking this all along?

     A life
where he belonged, having lived with himself

always, as a secret friend.

A few may have seen him then. In evidence:
the stopped dots
of children & dogs, sudden weave

          of a car--
acquaintances, circling up
into the adventure they imagined. They saw him drop

through the line breaks
and preciousness of art

down to the lake
which openly awaited him.
               Here the thin
  green ice allowed him in.

Some ran, and were late.
These would
forever imagine tragedy

(endless descent,
his face floating among the reeds,
unrecognized), as those

who imagine the silence of a guest
to be mysterious, or wrong.

"Weathering" by Fleur Adcock

[thistle-verse.livejournal.com]

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.

But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn't care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that's all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.

If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it's little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

~

posting a link b/c its really really really really long

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

The Song Of Arthur - Chapter I - XI
by S. Fowler Wright

Morgan Le Fay

Merlin, of human birth and demon sire,
Was therefore of delight and of desire
Different from those of human parents twain.
Never in damsel's arms his lust had lain;
Never his heart for any maiden's kiss
Had ached. But to another world than this
He turned, and in the eyes of Nimue
He sought the joys of common love to see.

http://www.tintagelcastle.nl/html/the_song_of_arthur.html

Hug O' War by Shel Silverstein

[pjcop.livejournal.com]

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

- Shel Silverstein

PSA

[3g0.livejournal.com]

Hello again. The tags system has been implemented starting today. We will pilot it for two months and, so long as it is working well, we'll continue using them. A great many of the tag list are contemporary poets, mostly American. It's possible that some well-known greats have been omitted, especially from the foreign circles. If you would like to have a poet added, please leave a comment here and I will update the tags periodically. Because of the way that the tags have to be set up: separated by commas, I couldn't categorize them by last name first. Unfortunately they will be listed alphabetically by first name, which is inconvenient, but until they modify the way that tags operate, I'm not going to be able to change that very easily.

Finally, I banned quite a few sock-puppet accounts from this community. Once I started looking at IP addresses, I found three addresses that were linked to several different accounts, and the remaining accounts that I banned were apparently "fake" accounts associated with the the initial three IP address accounts. If you were banned by mistake, please direct an email to me and I will evaluate the situation. If we continue to have problems with trolling by persons with enough time on their hands to manufacture endless fake accounts, I have no problems switching the membership to require moderator approval in order to join.

Glyn Maxwell

[britainophira.livejournal.com]

Garden City Quatrains

First day of school. A boy looks through a pane.
This is the end of freedom, not a visit.
The King's Cross-York-Newcastle-Scotland train
Slams through Welwyn Garden and I miss it.

*

1880. Howard, an asthmatic geezer
Home from Nebraska batters down a map.
Says Bernard Shaw, 'What's happening Ebenezer?'
'Quiet,' says Howard, 'I think I've found a gap.'

*

By all means vanish, shrug and with a sniff
Explain your town is dead, that anywhere
You're not a native must be filled with life.
Remember where you're gone the air is thin.

( The rest under here. )

The Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke

[angabel.livejournal.com]

The Poet

O hour of my muse: why do you leave me,
Wounding me by the wingbeats of your flight?
Alone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?

How shall I pass my days? And how my nights?

I have no one to love. I have no home.
There is no center to sustain my life.
All things to which I give myself grow rich
and leave me spent, impoverished, alone.

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

The Story of Our Lives

[howiec.livejournal.com]

( by Mark Strand )