Do take a look at this poem by Jonathan Mayhew. I find it mesmerizing. It’s one of those poems that make me feel like the poet gave me a poetic voice and expressed my way of being.
What is it about poetry that sometimes it speaks to you on a very profound level for seemingly no reason whatsoever and sometimes it refuses to do so entirely?
I tried to find my favorite to share, but found this and thought of your love of peaches:
Couple Sharing a Peach
It’s not the first time
we’ve bitten into a peach.
But now at the same time
it splits–half for each.
Our “then” is inside its “now,”
its halved pit unfleshed–what was refreshed.
Two happinesses unfold
from one joy, folioed.
In a hotel room
our moment lies
with its ode inside,
a red tinge,
with a hinge.~ Molly Peacock
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From this blog:
http://theartofreading.wordpress.com/
“what was” is in italics.
//What is it about poetry that sometimes it speaks to you on a very profound level for seemingly no reason whatsoever and sometimes it refuses to do so entirely?
For me too. Even if I understand it’s not very good poetry sometimes. Are poems that you love usually about love? That poem in Russian, this one…
With me it’s love & often sadness. Here an example:
A. E. Housman – 8 O’Clock
He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
May be, you would once create a post, under which readers would share their favorite poems? And share when you began enjoying poetry, at what age and what your absolute favorites are in English, Russian & Spanish (for people who understand it).
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“May be, you would once create a post, under which readers would share their favorite poems”
– We can do it right here, in this thread.
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And one of my favorites – W. H. Auden “The Two” (or “The Witnesses”) about totalitarianism. Especially the stanza before the last, look at it, a scene from practically every book about Stalin’s purges.
http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.two.html
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“When women spread their skirts over the men,
something, maybe the wind, is overcome and loves,
becomes a drifter of dreams through cobbled inland waves,
looks for warm, salty tears nestled between breasts.
Can turn quiet October into a breaker of hearts.
When women spread their skirts over the men,
the sun is ample and unconscious. Sheets dry quickly.
Surprises come with tender garments flapping;
with small buttons that burst and fall and roll;
with sudden air that bangs a window shut and catches the dark.
Women billow and furl their skirts,
as wet, thrashing fish slip through their hands,
one of those fish learning how uncertain
is the passing of a summer cloud that rumbles distance,
that pierces cloud caps, pinked with mackerel edges.
When women spread their skirts over the men,
they cast a net of shadows
over the soft, helpless form that lies there.
Child, this being female, this glistening, this tremor,
is what wind, sun, and cloud made you. You make something else.”
– Noel Valis.
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I liked the last 2 lines. As I understood, it’s the opposite of what many religious fundamentalists say about “woman’s place” (kitchen, church, kids).
“spread their skirts over the men” refers to sex, right?
Wisława Szymborska, Psalm (1976)
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin – still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.(Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)
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Eros
~ Robert Bridges
Why hast thou nothing in thy face?
Thou idol of the human race,
Thou tyrant of the human heart,
The flower of lovely youth that art;
Yea, and that standest in thy youth
An image of eternal Truth,
With thy exuberant flesh so fair,
That only Pheidias might compare,
Ere from his chaste marmoreal form
Time had decayed the colours warm;
Like to his gods in thy proud dress,
Thy starry sheen of nakedness.
Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,
But shameless will and power immense,
In secret sensuous innocence.
O king of joy, what is thy thought?
I dream thou knowest it is nought,
And wouldst in darkness come, but thou
Makest the light where’er thou go.
Ah yet no victim of thy grace,
None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,
Hath cared to look upon thy face.
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An absolutely phenomenal poem in Russian by poet Nina Iskrenko:
Говорил своей хохлатке
в голубом платке с получки
вдоль по Пироговке
Говорил Уедем Рита
Заработаю на хату
Будешь ты обута
Будешь кушать апельсины
Коврик купим с полосами
Там красиво Север
Отводил рукою пряди
льнул картофельным медведем
говорил Уедем
говорил Ни капли Баста
Чтоб ей скверной было пусто
Завязал я Рита
Говорил Последний раз я
В рот упала папироса
Магазин закрылся
Тронул крепко одичало
Раздавил в кульке печенье
Сплюнул непечатно
Так и шли законным браком
к задним бедам кислым брюкам
плыли к боку боком
Эх российские буренки
голубые табуретки
Масловки-Таганки
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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