Poems

I have always loved Pam Ayers’ poems. ‘The Paraffin Man’, and ‘They should have asked my husband’.

(Not that I don’t still appreciate Pam)

This is lovely! I’m certainly moving on from “I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth”!

Had to share this one:

Pets, death and indoor plants
By Myron Lysenko

We're becoming old enough
to want to change our lifestyles;
we're looking for substitutes
for sex & drugs & rock & roll.

But our dog...died
our cat...collapsed
budgies... wouldn't... budge.
Our roses...sank
our ferns...fizzled
cactus...carked it.

Yet seated around roast dinners
our parents still talk about
the possibility of grandchildren.

Our minds...boggle
our bodies...fidget
our voices...falter.

We're still immature
& we'd like to be
for a few years yet.

The world's not ready for our baby;
we're not ready for the world.
We're still trying to learn

how to make love properly;
still trying to come to terms
with pets & death & indoor plants.

Oh, that's so touching - and sad too. I guess it must be autobiographical.

I love Wendy Cope. This is from her anthology ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’.

Tich Miller

Tich Miller wore glasses
with elastoplast-pink frames
and had one foot three sizes larger than the other.

When they picked teams for outdoor games
she and I were always the last two
left standing by the wire-mesh fence.

We avoided one another’s eyes,
stooping, perhaps, to re-tie a shoelace,
or affecting interest in the flight

of some fortunate bird, and pretended
not to hear the urgent conference:
‘Have Tubby!’ ‘No, no, have Tich!’

Usually they chose me, the lesser dud,
and she lolloped, unselected,
to the back of the other team.

At eleven we went to different schools.
In time I learned to get my own back,
sneering at hockey-players who couldn’t spell.

Tich died when she was twelve.

by Wendy Cope

That's a sad poem maryeliza - such a contrast to the Wendy Cope one.

And finally for the love that never quite happened

Somewhere on the Way
Pete Roche

I wanted to say a lot of things
I wanted to say how often lately
Your bright image has wandered through
The dark rooms of my mind:
I wanted to say how good it is
To wake up every morning
Knowing that the day contains
Something that is you.

I wanted to say a lot of things:
I wanted to talk about
The changing colour of moments,
The silent secret language
Of bodies making love.
I wanted to say that you
Are always only as far from me
As thoughts are from thinking.

I wanted to say I love you
In fourteen foreign languages
But most of all (most
Difficult of all) in English.

I wanted to say a lot of things.
But they all seem to have lost themselves
Somewhere on the way. And now I'm here
There's nothing I can say except
Hello, and Yes, I'd like some coffee, and
What shall we find to talk about
Before the night burns out?

Wendy Cope
A Vow

I cannot promise never to be angry;
I cannot promise always to be kind.
You know what you are taking on, my darling –
It's only at the start that love is blind.

And yet I'm still the one you want to be with
And you're the one for me – of that I'm sure.
You are my closest friend, my favourite person,
The lover and the home I've waited for.

I cannot promise that I will deserve you
From this day on. I hope to pass that test.
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best.

The Road not Taken is another good Frost poem.

Rosen says you can do anything you want with a poem, ignore it, forget it, decide you don't like it - or leave it for fifty years and rediscover it later.
This thread is certainly making me do that.

This poem is called Fidelity - I think it’s utterly beautiful in what it has to say about love - the last two verses say it all for me

By D. H. Lawrence

Fidelity and love are two different things, like a flower
and a gem.
And love, like a flower, will fade, will change into
something else
or it would not be flowery.

O flowers they fade because they are moving swiftly; a
little torrent of life
leaps up to the summit of the stem, gleams, turns over
round the bend
of the parabola of curved flight,
sinks, and is gone, like a cornet curving into the invisible.

O flowers they are all the time travelling
like cornets, and they come into our ken
for a day, for two days, and withdraw, slowly vanish again.

And we, we must take them on the wing, and let them go.
Embalmed flowers are not flowers, immortelles are not
flowers;
flowers are just a motion, a swift motion, a coloured
gesture;
that is their loveliness. And that is love.

But a gem is different. It lasts so much longer than we do
so much much much longer
that it seems to last forever.
Yet we know it is flowing away
as flowers are, and we are, only slower.
The wonderful slow flowing of the sapphire!

All flows, and every flow is related to every other flow.
Flowers and sapphires and us, diversely streaming.
In the old days, when sapphires were breathed upon and
brought forth
during the wild orgasms of chaos
time was much slower, when the rocks came forth.
It took aeons to make a sapphire, aeons for it to pass away.

And a flower it takes a summer.
And man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth
flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than
foraminiferae
older than plasm altogether is the soul of a man
underneath.

And when, throughout all the wild orgasms of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten
rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks, a man’s heart
and a woman’s,

that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos
of love

Stopping by Woods is one I can remember from start to finish, Eloethan.
The Michael Rosen book I am reading with my grandson has Snow in the Suburbs by Thomas Hardy. That led us onto Stopping by Woods, then a look at New England, and Mending Wall.
I wonder if trump has read it.

I don' think it really matters if a poem rhymes or doesn't rhyme. If it touches you and you feel connected to the feelings expressed within it, then, in my view, whether you call it prose or poetry is irrelevant.

I find Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost particularly moving - and this one:-

Mid-Term Break
By Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Touch of the Abelard and Heloise, then? Look what happened to him!

Girls being the operative word?

Nobody has found out who it was written to, but at the time he wrote it, he was tutor to Fairfax's daughter.

I bet he said that to all the girls ?!

I agree especially that it’s funny - that’s why it would have worked on me - I always found a sens3 of humour irresistible in a msn??

maryeliza54 It is good isn't it! It's funny as well.

It’s the ultimate ‘get you into bed’ chat up poem isn’t it- it would have worked on me! Part of it is on the base of his statue in Hull by the Minster

To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

I remember this from school. The language is just wonderful .

I love 'Bed in Summer' by Robert Louis Stevenson, written from the perspective of a child.

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

I read that first when I was studying A level literature, Greyduster.
I must admit I can only ever remember the first two lines of it, and a few other phrases, but you are right, it sounds as if he is just watching it and describing its movement and majesty. I still like reading it out aloud to get the real rhythm of it.
I have to keep reminding myself when I see one that it's called a kestrel, not a windhover, as windhover is the first word that comes to mind.

Michael Rosen suggests that instead of asking what is a poem we should ask what can poetry do.
Poetry can make familiar things seem unfamiliar and vice versa. Windhover certainly fits in that category, but he uses two Shakespeare soliloquies for that.

I have never read that, dj. You can really see the bird, and feel the essence of it.

Greyduster, that poem reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover, one of my favourites.

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

I am reading a book by Michael Rosen at the moment called What is Poetry.

It begins "A poem is a poem if the writer and the reader agree it's a poem."

A good enough definition for me, and I used to teach it in secondary school.

Phenomenal Woman - by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.