What is your favourite poem? I like "A Thousand Winds"

[applegrove]

Makes me think of my grandmothers.

A Thousand Winds

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

by Mary Elizabeth Frye

[femmocrat]

1. I like that one too. I never knew the name of it.

My cousin, who is a minister, read it at my father's funeral.

I don't really have a favorite poem because I remember reading and memorizing poetry in school as a kind of torture. I do like Walt Whitman though.

[NewJeffCT]

2. Harlem by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Always liked it because I've been a dreamer my entire life. So, while I can't relate to the experience of being raised in Harlem, I can relate to being a dreamer.

[Rowdyboy]

3. Walt Whitman: "When I heard at the close of the day'

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,

When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

4. Victor Hugo - Apres La Bataille (After The Battle)

Après la bataille

Mon père, ce héros au sourire si doux,
Suivi d’un seul housard qu’il aimait entre tous
Pour sa grande bravoure et pour sa haute taille,
Parcourait à cheval, le soir d’une bataille,
Le champ couvert de morts sur qui tombait la nuit.
Il lui sembla dans l’ombre entendre un faible bruit.
C’était un Espagnol de l’armée en déroute
Qui se traînait sanglant sur le bord de la route,
Râlant, brisé, livide, et mort plus qu’à moitié.
Et qui disait: ” A boire! à boire par pitié ! ”
Mon père, ému, tendit à son housard fidèle
Une gourde de rhum qui pendait à sa selle,
Et dit: “Tiens, donne à boire à ce pauvre blessé. ”
Tout à coup, au moment où le housard baissé
Se penchait vers lui, l’homme, une espèce de maure,
Saisit un pistolet qu’il étreignait encore,
Et vise au front mon père en criant: “Caramba! ”
Le coup passa si près que le chapeau tomba
Et que le cheval fit un écart en arrière.

“Donne-lui tout de même à boire”, dit mon père.

Victor Hugo


(translation)

After The Battle

My father, that hero with such a sweet smile
Followed by a lone hussar that he loved among all others
Because of his great courage and his tall stance
Wandered around on horseback, the evening of a battle
The field covered with dead, on whom fell the night.
It seemed to him in the shadows to hear a feeble sound.
It was a Spaniard from the routed army
Who dragged his bloody self on the edge of the road.
Groaning, broken, livid, and more than half dead
And who said: "a drink, a drink, for pity's sake".
My father, moved, handed to his loyal hussar
A gourd of rum that hung from his saddle
And said: "Here, give a drink to this poor wounded man".
Suddenly, at the moment the bent over hussar
Leaned towards him, the man, a type of Moor
Seized a pistol that he clasped still
And aimed at the brow of my father while shouting "caramba"!
The shot passed so close that the hat fell
And the horse shied backwards.

"Give him nonetheless a drink", said my father.

[malthaussen]

8. Ah, I like that

And fully agree with the sentiment.

-- Mal

[elleng]

5. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

[applegrove]

6. Yes. That is a classic.

[malthaussen]

7. Well, my favorite poems are my own compositions...

... but I've always liked this when it comes to OPP (Other People's Poetry):

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(William Yeats)

-- Mal

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

16. You beat me to it! The Second Coming is probably my favorite

although it's kind of scary.

[Skittles]

9. dedicated to Rowdyboy

"For Those I Love" by Isla Paschal Richardson

If I should ever leave you whom I love
To go along the Silent Way,
Grieve not,
Nor speak of me with tears,
But laugh and talk of me as if I were beside you there.

( I'd come - I'd come, could I but find a way!
But would not tears and grief be barriers? )
And when you hear a song
Or see a bird I loved,
Please do not let the thought of me be sad...
For I am loving you just as I always have...
You were so good to me!

There are so many things I wanted still to do -
So many things to say to you...
Remember that I did not fear...
It was Just leaving you that was so hard to face...
We cannot see Beyond...
But this I know:
I love you so -
'twas heaven here with you!

[countryjake]

10. .

[femmocrat]

15. Thank you.

I just saw his favorite poem above.

[petronius]

11. Continent's End, by Robinson Jeffers

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary,
the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray,
the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent,
before me the mass and double stretch of water.

I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava
and coral sowings that flower the south,
Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours
that has followed the evening star.

The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you,
you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb
and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.

It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then
and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness,
the insolent quietness of stone.

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an ocean.

That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation
of thin vapor and watched you change them,
That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down,
eat rock, shift places with the continents.

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your
surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire,
both our tones flow from the older fountain.

http://www.robinsonjeffersassociation.org/2010/08/continent%E2%80%99s-end/

[HeiressofBickworth]

12. Prometheus Unbound (Shelley)

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent;
To Love and Bear; to Hope til Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter nor repent;
This, like thy Glory,Titan, is to be
Good, Great and Joyous, Beautiful and Free;
This alone is Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

[lovemydog]

13. My House by Lou Reed

My House (for Delmore Schwartz)

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
My house is very beautiful at night

My friend and teacher occupies a spare room
He's dead - at peace at last the Wandering Jew
Other friends have put stones on his grave
He was the first great man that I had ever met

Sylvia and I got out our Ouija Board
To dial a spirit - across the room it soared
We were happy and amazed at what we saw
Blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore

Delmore, I miss all your funny ways
I miss your jokes and the brilliant things you said
My Daedalus to your Bloom
Was such a perfect wit
And to find you in my house
Makes things perfect

I really got a lucky life
My writing, my motorcycle and my wife
And to top it all off a spirit of pure poetry
Is living in this stone and wood house with me

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
Our house is very beautiful at night

by Lou Reed

[struggle4progress]

14. anyone lived in a pretty how town (e e cummings)

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

[Chellee]

17. Ozymandias by Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.