Poem of the Day

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

To Genoveva: Your "favourite poet" being an unknown to me, had to do some looking. You are aware that an editor of the Atlantic Monthly encouraged the poet to reconstruct a collection of poems which for some reason was torn to pieces. The fragments were saved and published. I found this link useful...http://intersect.uoregon.edu/opal/ Another, if somewhat obscure, great talent. quasimodo1

---

Yes, quasimodo1, however, it was not a collection of poems that were torn to pieces and published, it was her childhood diary. A very interesting author from here in Oregon!

The Lake Isle

O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time.

Ezra Pound

Breathe on me winter wind
Sweep back old leaves, new shoots stir
Always, clouds come, have gone.

my first haiku. Airam. Criticism more than welcome

amazing how plath can make one thing, like a mushroom, be so many other things, a fist, shelves, tables, hammers etc, etc, So clever. Her words give life to ordinary things, even though living, and assimilates them to be equal to our own lives..........all living things being of equal importance.
reminds of The Carpet Sweeper by carol Rumens.
Airam

Everone who wants to write knows where ezra is coming from. However he did make it!

Megalosaurus

A MONSTER like a mountain, leathern limbed,
With eyes of sluggish ore and claws of stone,
He heaved his thunder-throated body, rimmed
By marsh fires human eyes have never known.
A monolith carved out of savage night,
He hid in his impenetrable hide
Muscle and blood, and nerves to sense delight
And agony that tore him when he died.

The clumsy terror of his frame has gone
The way of his blind, simple savagery.
Out of his casual bones men build the dawn
That bore and bred such brutish game as he.
But still endures his dull, confounding shape:
In wars of the wise offspring of the ape.

Babette Deutsch

(Mack The Knife by Bertolt Brecht)
Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows them pearly white.
Just a jack knife has Macheath, dear
And he keeps it out of sight.

When the shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread.
Fancy gloves, though, wears Macheath, dear
So there's not a trace of red.

On the side-walk Sunday morning
Lies a body oozing life;
Someone's sneaking 'round the corner.
Is that someone Mack the Knife?

From a tugboat by the river
A cement bag's dropping down;
The cement's just for the weight, dear.
Bet you Mackie's back in town.

Louie Miller disappeared, dear
After drawing out his cash;
And Macheath spends like a sailor.
Did our boy do something rash?

Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver,
Polly Peachum, Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, dear
Now that Mackie's back in town.

This novelist, poet and lover of jazz wrote some amazing if experimental stuff. His book "The Journal of Albion Moonlight" has great flashes of genious and humor. Here is a fragment of one of his poems. "Let Us Have Madness" by Kenneth Patchen
Let us have madness openly.
O men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear--
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head

The Bells
(Alcools: Les Cloches)



My gipsy beau my lover
Hear the bells above us

We loved passionately

Thinking none could see us



But we so badly hidden

All the bells in their song

Saw from heights of heaven

And told it everyone



Tomorrow Cyprien Henry

Marie Ursule Catherine

The baker’s wife her husband

and Gertrude that’s my cousin



Will smile when I go by them

I won’t know where to hide

You far and I’ll be crying

Perhaps I shall be dying

Lines Written in Oregon

Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.

Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger

And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –

Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.

Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.

Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).

Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.

Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.

And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;

Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.

– Vladimir Nabokov

Love's Blindness
Now do I know that Love is blind, for I
Can see no beauty on this beauteous earth,
No life, no light, no hopefulness, no mirth,
Pleasure nor purpose, when thou art not nigh.
Thy absence exiles sunshine from the sky,
Seres Spring's maturity, checks Summer's birth,
Leaves linnet's pipe as sad as plover's cry,
And makes me in abundance find but dearth.
But when thy feet flutter the dark, and thou
With orient eyes dawnest on my distress,
Suddenly sings a bird on every bough,
The heavens expand, the earth grows less and less,
The ground is buoyant as the ether now,
And all looks lovely in thy loveliness. Alfred Austin (1835-1913) succeeded Alfred Lord Tennyson as poet laureate of England...1896

The Microbe
by Hilaire Belloc

The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen--
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so....
Oh! let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea
I am the wave of the ocean.
I am the murmur of the billows.
I am the ox of the seven combats.
I am the vulture upon the rocks.
I am a beam of the Sun.
I am the fairest of plants.
I am a wild boar in valour.
I am a salmon in the water.
I am a lake in the plain.
I am a word of science.
I am a point of a lance in battle.
I am the God who created in the head the fire.
Who is it who throws into light the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the Moon?
Who teaches the place where couches the Sun?
If not I?

- Amergin

LOVE AND THE GENTLE HEART
Love and the gentle heart are one thing,
just as the poet says in his verse,
each from the other one as well divorced
as reason from the mind’s reasoning.

Nature craves love, and then creates love king,
and makes the heart a palace where he’ll stay,
perhaps a shorter or a longer day,
breathing quietly, gently slumbering.

Then beauty in a virtuous woman’s face
makes the eyes yearn, and strikes the heart,
so that the eyes’ desire’s reborn again,
and often, rooting there with longing, stays,

Till love, at last, out of its dreaming starts.
Woman’s moved likewise by a virtuous man.
( Dante Alighiere )