Ask Lemmy

I couldn't call either a favorite, but there are two that have stuck with me my whole life. Edit to fix formatting.

The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)

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?

It feels as relevant to our time as it was for WW1.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Violets are red
Roses are blue
When you open up photoshop
And fuck up the HUE

Marie Howe, New York State's Poet Laureate:

Practicing By Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody's parents' house, a hymn for what we didn't say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other's mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda's basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria's father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other's throats.

We sucked each other's breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone's hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we'd
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we'd made ourselves stop.

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Look at my instance name

Ozymandias by Percy Bysh Shelby

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.

Even though Yates himself called it "the way to lose a lady", I still like Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

A girlfriend came in built me a bed scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor scrubbed the walls vacuumed, cleaned the toilet, the bathtub, scrubbed the bathroom floor and cut my toenails and my hair. Then all on the same day the plumber came and fixed the kitchen faucet and the toilet and the gas man fixed the heater and the phone man fixed the phone.

Now I sit in all this perfection.

It is quiet. I have broken off with all 3 of my girlfriends. I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can't even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rythm. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

-c. bukowski

Two Headed Calf makes me cri every tim

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature,

they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother.

It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

Sorry if this was already posted, but I didn't see it:

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There's also a short story by Ray Bradbury with the same title that quotes the poem.

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

l(a by e.e. cummings

l(a

le
af

fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Each year on the anniversary of when I got back my stem cells to cure my cancer, I read Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

I read it a bit early this year for this - this July 12th it will be 20 years unbowed.

Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About by Mary Oliver

The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.

It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's levelled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

—W. H. Auden

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

• Stephen Crane

A poem my brother wrote

Nothing changes, and it changes all at once. Nothing moves, nothing exists. Nothing is important, so we should learn nothing, we should study nothing, get close to nothing, be kind to nothing. We must come to understand nothing so well that we could maybe even see nothing in ourselves. Because nothing matters, nothing is important, and I think that’s something.

For Life I had never cared greatly, As worth a man's while; Peradventures unsought, Peradventures that finished in nought, Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately Unwon by its style.

In earliest years - why I know not - I viewed it askance; Conditions of doubt, Conditions that leaked slowly out, May haply have bent me to stand and to show not Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour It courted me then, Till evasions seemed wrong, Till evasions gave in to its song, And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller Than life among men.

Anew I found nought to set eyes on, When, lifting its hand, It uncloaked a star, Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar, And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon As bright as a brand.

And so, the rough highway forgetting, I pace hill and dale Regarding the sky, Regarding the vision on high, And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting My pilgrimage fail.

• Thomas Hardy

This one always stuck with me:

in time of daffodils(who know the goal of living is to grow) forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim the aim of waking is to dream, remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze our now and here with paradise) forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond whatever mind may comprehend, remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be (when time from time shall set us free) forgetting me,remember me

EE Cummings

First they came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Besides that, I have a book of poetry that I'm not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.

I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn't live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I've pieced together about them.

Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn't a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven't found any issues with her father.

She's very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.

A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn't see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn't something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)

Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.

They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother's insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn't heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn't remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like "I'm worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]" but she can't tell me what's supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn't find anything particularly noteworthy.

I've given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter's home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.

During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.

I of course had to search out what she had written.

At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn't actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I'd pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.

Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It's more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.

A Coat

By William Butler Yeats

I made my song a coat 

Covered with embroideries 

Out of old mythologies 

From heel to throat; 

But the fools caught it, 

Wore it in the world’s eyes 

As though they’d wrought it. 

Song, let them take it

For there’s more enterprise 

In walking naked.

The View from Halfway Down by Alison Tafel?

The weak breeze whispers nothing. The water screams sublime. His feet shift, teeter-totter; Deep breath, stand back - it's time.

Toes untouch the overpass, Soon he's water bound. Eyes lock shut, but peek to see The view from halfway down.

A little wind, a summer sun, A river rich and regal. A flood of fond endorphins Brings a calm that knows no equal.

You're flying now; you see things Much more clear than from the ground. It's all okay -- it would be, Were you not now halfway down.

Thrash to break from gravity; What now could slow the drop? All I'd give for toes to touch The safety back at top.

But this is it. The deed is done. Silence drowns the sound. Before I leaped, I should have seen The view from halfway down.

I really should have thought about The view from halfway down.

I wish I could have known about The view from halfway down.

Forever shut and made of wood,

That's what I am. My head's no good

now that it by a stone was struck.

Old spectacles bewitched with muck

repose within me by the score.

I'm just a cupboard, nothing more.

-Dancelot Wordwright

Featured in the novel The City of Dreaming Books, written by his authorial godson Optimus Yarnspinner. Translated from Zamonian and Illustrated by Walter Moers

Margaret Atwood - Cohabitation

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert 
                    the unpainted stairs 
at the back where we squat 
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

Dream Song 29 by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Poor moth, I can’t help you,
I can only turn out the light.

The Clock Man by Shel Silverstein

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” The clock man asked the child.

“Not one penny,” the answer came.

“For my days are as many as my smiles.”

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the child was grown.

“Maybe a dollar or maybe less, for I’ve plenty of days of my own.”

“How much will you pay for an extra day?” He asked when the time came to die.

“All of the pearls in all of the seas, and all of the stars in the sky.”

Underwear by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Still relevant.

Edit: Posting a runner-up, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till 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.

Sea Fever by John Mansfield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Hallaig, by Sorley MacLean.Here translated by the poet from Scots Gaelic:

‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’

The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig, a birch tree, and she has always been

between Inver and Milk Hollow, here and there about Baile-chuirn: she is a birch, a hazel, a straight, slender young rowan.

In Screapadal of my people where Norman and Big Hector were, their daughters and their sons are a wood going up beside the stream.

Proud tonight the pine cocks crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra, straight their backs in the moonlight – they are not the wood I love.

I will wait for the birch wood until it comes up by the cairn, until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice will be under its shade.

If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone.

They are still in Hallaig, MacLeans and MacLeods, all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim: the dead have been seen alive.

The men lying on the green at the end of every house that was, the girls a wood of birches, straight their backs, bent their heads.

Between the Leac and Fearns the road is under mild moss and the girls in silent bands go to Clachan as in the beginning,

and return from Clachan, from Suisnish and the land of the living; each one young and light-stepping, without the heartbreak of the tale.

From the Burn of Fearns to the raised beach that is clear in the mystery of the hills, there is only the congregation of the girls keeping up the endless walk,

coming back to Hallaig in the evening, in the dumb living twilight, filling the steep slopes, their laughter a mist in my ears,

and their beauty a film on my heart before the dimness comes on the kyles, and when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love;

and will strike the deer that goes dizzily, sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes; his eye will freeze in the wood, his blood will not be traced while I live.

And here a reading by the poet set to music by the late great Martyn Bennett:

https://vimeo.com/25562404?fl=pl&fe=sh

"Das Lied von der Glocke" (The Song Of The Bell) by Friedrich Schiller is a massive romantic poem describing the casting of a church bell as a heroic act and achievement of a god-fearing hard-working people. German teachers have made their students memorize and recite it for generations.
Here it is, along with its English translation:
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/das-lied-von-der-glocke-song-bell.html

This isn't my favorite poem. My favorite poem is the abbreviated version:

Loch in Boden
Bronze rin
Glocke fertig
Bim bim bim

(Dig a hole
Put bronze in
Bell is finished
Ding dong ding)

Two come to mind, I'll drop the heavy one first so if it bums you out, read the fun one next:

Married - Jack Gilbert - from the collection "Great Fires"

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came
there was no way to be sure which were
hers and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
this long black hair tangled in the dirt.

The Country - Billy Collins - from the collection "Nine Horses"

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

Wanna hear a limerick?

Lambert, Lambert, what a prick.

Howl
By Allen Ginsberg

it's long. just google it. :)

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

My honest answer is probably The Raven, but I'll post something less well known.

Gray Room

by Wallace Stevens

Although you sit in a room that is gray,

Except for the silver

Of the straw-paper,

And pick

At your pale white gown;

Or lift one of the green beads

Of your necklace,

To let it fall;

Or gaze at your green fan

Printed with the red branches of a red willow;

Or, with one finger,

Move the leaf in the bowl--

The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia

Beside you...

What is all this?

I know how furiously your heart is beating.

Spleen

"I sit at home and i'm so bored.

It is such lousy weather

I wish i was 2 little dogs.

So i could play together."

Translation: B.Speelpenning
Author: Friedrich Torberg

“The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot

Check out the poem and its analysis via the link.

Hi bamo!

Sappho - Fragment 147 - bits of a text that was mostly destroyed by time, the remaining words gave us this

This may come off as really pretentious, but when I’m feel a wistful melancholy for the past, I hear this short poem I wrote a few years ago called Still Here:

I thought this feeling cast away

Though here it is, perhaps to stay

Though years have passed and I have cried

My inward plea is still denied

"We will not cease from our exploration. And the end of our exploring Will be to return to the place we began, And to know that place for the first time."

Basic-ass bitch T.S. Elliot poem. But it hits hard for me growing up in a small town (3,400 ppl) and left to move to a big city (500,000). And I'm reminded of this poem everytime I go back to visit.

Oh pointy birds

Oh pointy pointy

Anoint my head

Anointy nointy

-Steve Martin