your favorite poets?

[Redruth]

EVOLUTION

 

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish

In the Paleozoic time,

And side by side on the ebbing tide

We sprawled through the ooze and slime,

Or skittered with many a caudal flip

Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,

My heart was rife with the joy of life,

For I loved you even then.

 

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved

And mindless at last we died;

And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift

We slumbered side by side.

The world turned on in the lathe of time,

The hot lands heaved amain,

Till we caught our breath from the womb of death

And crept into light again.

 

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,

And drab as a dead man's hand;

We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees

Or trailed through the mud and sand.

Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet,

Writing a language dumb,

With never a spark in the empty dark

To hint at a life to come.

 

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,

And happy we died once more;

Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold

Of a Neocomian shore.

The eons came and the eons fled

And the sleep that wrapped us fast

Was riven away in a newer day

And the night of death was past.

 

Then light and swift through the jungle trees

We swung in our airy flights,

Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms

In the hush of the moonless nights;

And, oh! what beautiful years were there

When our hearts clung each to each;

When life was filled and our senses thrilled

In the first faint dawn of speech.

 

Thus life by life and love by love

We passed through the cycles strange,

And breath by breath and death by death

We followed the chain of change.

Till there came a time in the law of life

When over the nursing side

The shadows broke and the soul awoke

In a strange, dim dream of God.

 

I was thewed like an Auroch bull

And tusked like the great cave bear;

And you, my sweet, from head to feet

Were gowned in your glorious hair.

Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,

When the night fell o'er the plain

And the moon hung red o'er the river bed

We mumbled the bones of the slain.

 

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge

And shaped it with brutish craft;

I broke a shank from the woodland lank

And fitted it, head and haft;

Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn

Where the mammoth came to drink;

Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone

And slew him upon the brink.

 

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,

Loud answered our kith and kin;

From west to east to the crimson feast

The clan came tramping in.

O'er joint and gristle and padded bone

We fought and clawed and tore,

And cheek by jowl with many a growl

We talked the marvel o'er.

 

I carved the fight on a reindeer bone

With rude and hairy hand;

I pictured his fall on the cavern wall

That men might understand.

For we lived by blood and the right of might

Ere human laws were drawn,

And the age of sin did not begin

Till our brutal tush were gone.

 

And that was a million years ago

In a time that no man knows;

Yet here tonight in the mellow light

We sit at Delmonico's.

Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,

Your hair is dark as jet,

Your years are few, your life is new,

Your soul untried, and yet -

 

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay

And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;

We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones

And deep in the Coralline crags;

Our love is old, our lives are old,

And death shall come amain;

Should it come today, what man may say

We shall not live again?

 

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds

And furnished them wings to fly;

He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,

And I know that it shall not die,

Though cities have sprung above the graves

Where the crook-bone men make war

And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves

Where the mummied mammoths are.

 

Then as we linger at luncheon here

O'er many a dainty dish,

Let us drink anew to the time when you

Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

 

- Langdon Smith

 

thx u for this

[Guest Scrambled Ears]

Pan With Us

"Pan came out of the woods one day,--

His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,

The gray of the moss of walls were they,--

And stood in the sun and looked his fill

At wooded valley and wooded hill.

 

He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,

On a height of naked pasture land;

In all the country he did command

He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.

That was well! and he stamped a hoof.

 

His heart knew peace, for none came here

To this lean feeding save once a year

Someone to salt the half-wild steer,

Or homespun children with clicking pails

Who see so little they tell no tales.

 

He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach

A new-world song, far out of reach,

For sylvan sign that the blue jay's screech

And the whimper of hawks beside the sun

Were music enough for him, for one.

 

Times were changed from what they were:

Such pipes kept less of power to stir

The fruited bough of the juniper

And the fragile bluets clustered there

Than the merest aimless breath of air.

 

They were pipes of pagan mirth,

And the world had found new terms of worth.

He laid him down on the sun-burned earth

And raveled a flower and looked away--

Play? Play?--What should he play?"

 

-Robert Frost

 

Ozymandius

"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."

 

-Percy Bysshee Shelley

 

To my accuser who is the God of this world

"Truly my satan thou art but a dunce

And know not the garment from the man

Every harlot was a virgin once

Nor canst though turn kate into nan."

 

-Blake

 

"Naughts had and all is spent when desire is met without content"

 

-The Immortal Bard

 

if my mind was one part and my body two

how might I know which piece was true?

a desolate flesh is strong but cheap

a body-less thought is mine to keep

 

-Me

[soundwave]

[Redruth]

 

To my accuser who is the God of this world

"Truly my satan thou art but a dunce

And know not the garment from the man

Every harlot was a virgin once

Nor canst though turn kate into nan."

 

-Blake

[Guest Scrambled Ears]

such is the gates of paradise

[azatoth]

Martin Silenus

 

This.

 

But seriously, I don't get poetry.

[marf]

Begone J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. Rip, shred, tear. Rip it out.

[sup]

probly my one are best. ive not been long enough hear to find the other bests

lol i thought it said your fav posts

[Guest Babar]

probly my one are best. ive not been long enough hear to find the other bests

lol i thought it said your fav posts

 

Brillant. Sup for next Craig Anderson !

[Guest ruiagnelo]

probly my one are best. ive not been long enough hear to find the other bests

lol i thought it said your fav posts

 

*brings the facepalm cargo truck*

[doorjamb]

Good Dog Nigel

by John Lennon

 

Arf, Arf, he goes, a merry sight,

 

Our hairy little friend,

 

Arf, Arf, upon the lampost bright,

 

Arfing round the bend.

 

Nice dog! Goo boy,

 

Waggie tail and beg,

 

Clever Nigel, jump for joy

 

Because we're putting you to sleep at three of the clock, Nigel.

[Atop]

Bukowski

 

Baudelaire

 

Blake

 

Æ

 

Eliot

 

Shakespeare

 

Wallace Stevens

 

George Sterling

[chenGOD]

T.S. Eliot and ee cummings and some Korean poets.

[sup]

T.S. Eliot and ee cummings and some Korean poets.

how can korean poetry work they dont have letters??

[Redruth]

Blake

Eliot

Shakespeare

[kakapo]

Prison for strikers, bring back the cat

Kick out the niggers, howza 'bout that.

[chim]

Prison for strikers, bring back the cat

Kick out the niggers, howza 'bout that.

 

 

Through countless measures gathered,

by all decisions made.

to live into the Autumn,

we all have done the same.

 

lest Fate be long forgotten

our souls be ruled to burn,

we give ourselves to no one

and see none in return.

 

The pious Truth be given

Fate wrought, through blood and tears,

stands true for all the living

and lasts a thousand years.

[azatoth]

When, long ago, the gods created Earth

In Iove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.

The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;

Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,

Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,

Filled it with vice, and called the thing a nigger.

 

H.P. Lovecraft

[oyster]

charles bukowski

[Guest Scrambled Ears]

charles bukowski

oh yes

[Hoodie]

When, long ago, the gods created Earth

In Iove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.

The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;

Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,

Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,

Filled it with vice, and called the thing a nigger.

 

H.P. Lovecraft

 

 

i always forget that lovecraft was racist.

[Atop]

charles bukowski

charles bukowski

oh yes

 

Does anyone read whole threads nowadays?

[Guest Billov]

probly my one are best. ive not been long enough hear to find the other bests

lol i thought it said your fav posts

this is my favourite post... shits gold mang

 

I don't read enough poetry but from what I studied in school I liked Keats, Michael Longley, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop and Dylan Thomas is pretty groovy but I haven't read enough...

 

charles bukowski

charles bukowski

oh yes

 

Does anyone read whole threads nowadays?

according to this thread, NO

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/59812-who-is-on-your-ignore-list/

[Guest happycase]

Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,

Which grieving will not sweeten.

 

Poison grows in this dark.

It is in the water of tears

Its black blooms rise.

 

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world

 

Leaves you

With him for whom no phantasy moves,

And you are pierced by a death.

 

~Wallace Stevens

 

 

***

 

The old brown hen and the old blue sky,

Between the two we live and die--

The broken cartwheel on the hill.

 

As if, in the presence of the sea,

We dried our nets and mended sail

And talked of never-ending things,

 

Of the never-ending storm of will,

One will and many wills, and the wind,

Of many meanings in the leaves,

 

Brought down to one below the eaves,

Link, of that tempest, to the farm,

The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

 

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.

It is not a voice that is under the eaves.

It is not speech, the sound we hear

 

In this conversation, but the sound

Of things and their motion: the other man,

A turquoise monster moving round.

 

~Wallace Stevens

 

Damn, this one's hot!

 

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,

When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;

Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

 

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.

The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.

The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

 

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,

From the bombastic intimations of winter

And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

 

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy

Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.

The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

 

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.

The negroes were playing football in the park.

The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

 

The premiss from which all things were conclusions,

The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies

And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.

 

~Wallace Stevens

[Atop]

Poet extraordinaire!