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#Post#: 48012--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: Lurknomore Date: December 2, 2021, 8:29 pm
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Wow. Half Staff gave me chills.
#Post#: 60387--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: January 10, 2022, 9:26 am
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Good Bones. by Maggie Smith (same one who wrote the poem above
about school shootings)
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
#Post#: 60798--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: guest114 Date: January 11, 2022, 2:01 am
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Maggie Smith is amazing despite her prosaic name. Thanks for
sharing! (And "Good Bones" is one of my favorites of hers.)
#Post#: 79314--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: March 4, 2022, 9:27 pm
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The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?
#Post#: 79355--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: muskrat Date: March 5, 2022, 8:23 am
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+1 for slouching towards Bethlehem (RIP Joan Didion)
Thanks for posting it here: now I can easily re read whenever I
want.
#Post#: 86271--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: April 1, 2022, 9:18 am
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Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
#Post#: 88669--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: April 12, 2022, 9:21 am
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Mercy, by
José Antonio Rodríguez
If you could ask the stars,
Those flickers that visit nightly,
They would tell you it wasn’t them
Who carved us from mud
To marvel at our opposable thumbs.
It wasn’t them who forfeited God
For a watch that didn’t work anyway.
It wasn’t them who sometimes denied
Us the living mirror we named love.
And still you look to them
For stories, for riddles, for answers
That they never possessed.
I’m not saying I’m better than you,
Far from it, if you find me here
Erecting the same elements
With these meager tools,
Wanting even now to give them life,
That they may look upon me with mercy.
I’ve been a prophet. I’ve been a fool.
#Post#: 92203--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: April 27, 2022, 12:17 pm
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For the Bird Singing before Dawn, by Kim Stafford
Some people presume to be hopeful
when there is no evidence for hope,
to be happy when there is no cause.
Let me say now, I’m with them.
In deep darkness on a cold twig
in a dangerous world, one first
little fluff lets out a peep, a warble,
a song—and in a little while, behold:
the first glimmer comes, then a glow
filters through the misty trees,
then the bold sun rises, then
everyone starts bustling about.
And that first crazy optimist, can we
forgive her for thinking, dawn by dawn,
“Hey, I made that happen!
And oh, life is so fine.”
#Post#: 95159--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: muskrat Date: May 10, 2022, 4:28 pm
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(I first read this years ago in WaPo Book World's "Poet's
Choice" column 🦔)
The Mower
BY Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
#Post#: 97532--------------------------------------------------
Re: Poems
By: LesserGoddess Date: May 22, 2022, 12:36 pm
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I've removed the Brodsky poem - here's why.
HTML https://spectator.org/the-ally-of-executioners-alexander-pushkin-joseph-brodsky-and-the-deep-roots-of-russian-chauvinism/
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