(*) Some poems

Here's some poems I've discovered along the way... all different, all unique - just like each and every one of us! (Ooooooooohhhhhhh! lol)

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What we have not named
or beheld as a symbol
escapes our notice.

W.H. Auden

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The Lord survives the rainbow of His will

Robert Lowell
'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket'

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I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

T.S. Eliot
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

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Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D.H. Lawrence

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Van Gogh

All your best paintings, I have heard, were made
When you were mad. I know you sliced your ear
Off, went insane. Yet only that church in
The Louvre might possibly suggest you had
Something that most men call a mental flaw;
Yet even there's a woman with a thin

Bonnet and skirts raised from the dusty ground.
Detail you saw, and foolish men suggest
Such probing gazes are a sign of being
A little crazy, not quite balanced, found,
When tested, passionate, too much depressed,
Quickly in tears. This was your way of seeing.

There is a theory that the very heart
Of making means a flaw, neurosis, some
Sickness; yet others say it is release.
I only know that your wild, surging art
Took you to agony, but makes us come
Strangely to gentleness, a sense of peace.

Elizabeth Jennings

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Rain

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

Hone Tuwhare

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"Long Live the Weeds"
(Hopkins)

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit,
Hope, love, crate, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.

Theodore Roethke

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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

>From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in it's belly until my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randell Jarrell

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The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

William Carlos Williams

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Proletarian Portrait

A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing
on the street

One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail

That has been hurting her.

William Carlos Williams

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Houses

People who are afraid of themselves
multiply themselves into families
and so divide themselves
and so become less afraid.

People who might have to go out
into clanging strangers' laughter,
crowd under roofs, make compacts
to no more than smile at each other.

People who might meet their own faces
or surprise their own faces in doorways
build for themselves rooms without mirrors
and live between walls without echoes.

People who might meet other faces
and unknown voices around corners
build themselves rooms all mirrors
and live between walls all echoes.

People who are afraid to go naked
clothe themselves in families, houses,
but are still afraid of death
because death one day will undress them.

A.S.J. Tessimond

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Cyalayta
Mal  :o)
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"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train." (Robert Lowell)