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[Canucksaram]

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace Stevens, which can be found at:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html

[huck]

This one is the one I gave my family to explain why I do what I do...

The Double Life
By Don Blanding


How very simple life would be
If only there were two of me
A Restless Me to drift and roam
A Quiet Me to stay at home.
A Searching One to find his fill
Of varied skies and newfound thrill
While sane and homely things are done
By the domestic Other One.

And that's just where the trouble lies;
There is a Restless Me that cries
For chancy risks and changing scene,
For arctic blue and tropic green,
For deserts with their mystic spell,
For lusty fun and raising Hell

But shackled to that Restless Me
My Other Self rebelliously
Resists the frantic urge to move.
It seeks the old familiar groove
That habits make. It finds content

With hearth and home dear prisonment,
With candlelight and well loved books
And treasured loot in dusty nooks,
With puttering and garden things
And dreaming while a cricket sings
And all the while the Restless One
Insists on more exciting fun
It wants to go with every tide,
No matter where�� just for the ride.
Like yowling cats the two selves brawl
Until I have no peace at all.

One eye turns to the forward track,
The other eye looks sadly back,
I'm getting wall-eyed from the strain,
(It's tough to have an idle brain)
But One says "Stay" and One says "Go"
And One says "Yes," and One says "no,"
And One Self wants a home and wife
And One Self craves the drifter's life.

The Restless Fellow always wins
I wish my folks had made me twins.

[flakfizer]

Well, it's not my favorite poem, but it's one of my faves by one of my favorite poets, A.E. Housman. And, it is just about to become very relevant.



A. E. Housman. 1859–

33. "Loveliest of Trees"

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, 5
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room, 10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

[Noureli]

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake

[khyber]

not too exciting, exotic or current:
I'm affraid i simply can't get enough of "The Raven"

[ThePoet]

An Angel's Kiss

by Casey Allen

I lie behind you.

Watching your shoulders slowly
rise and fall to your breathing.

Propped up on one arm I study you.

The gentle sighs you softly make.
From a glimpse I see subtle smiles
of passion fulfilled sometime earlier
and again earlier but now you sleep.

I watch over you.

Holding you, protecting you, keeping you safe
from out there. My arms encircle you.

In your dreams I seek you.

Because it was not always this way.
In your dreams you cast your wish
that it was this way and will be forever,
and I will be your guardian angel.

To make those dreams come true.



and of course....


Ode to the Crew
Casey Allen

You have followed others
up to the great beyond,
where air is gone and space abounds.

You went as explorers.
You've gone as pioneers to the vastness
that surrounds us - anchored here.

Only a few have died before you,
and the tragedy of your death
rings home, rings true, rings loud.

I would wish this did not happen to you,
but, if its any consolation, you've added
to the flames that feed our drive to learn.

Your death serves as a reminder
that the business you are in is full of danger.
It takes this for any of us to realize it.

Yet, if I could, I would have traded places
with any one if you, proud of the work
and of the accomplishments I'd made.

You're heroic deeds will allow us to soar higher.
Godspeed the crew of STS-107
as it was with Apollo 1 and Mission 51-L.

[Pink Freud]

First read this as an undergrad. Still blows me away.

Robert Bringhurst

THESE POEMS
________________________________________
These poems she said
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket's
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love, love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said. . . .
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.


Robert Bringhurst, in The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems, 1972-82
Copper Canyon Press, 1982