Poetry Appreciation (do NOT post your own poetry)

Nothing Lasts Forever

They told him "Nothing lasts forever"
So Nothing's what he left to find,
He filled his heart with quiet cobwebs
And pushed the thoughts out from his mind.
Dropped all the things that ever hurt him
Then dropped the things he cared for too,
For they say "Nothing's worth the pain"
And pain was all he ever knew.
He picked bouquets of silence,
Wore the shadows as a coat,
Then used their inky darkness
When on the empty air he wrote:
"My whole life I've chased Nothing,
For it I have Nothing to show.
I've got Nothing in my heart
And there is Nothing that I know,
But I'd give Everything for Something
That could erase what I'd been told,
For emptiness is the heaviest thing
I've ever had to hold."

~Erin Hanson

 

The Coin by Sara Teasdale

Into my heart’s treasury
I slipped a coin
That time cannot take
Nor a thief purloin,
Oh better than the minting
Of a gold-crowned king
Is the safe-kept memory
Of a lovely thing.

 

"Rain Light" by W.S. Merwin

All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

 

"Scars" by Erin Hanson

 

Love Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

~Pablo Neruda

 

I Am Vertical
By Sylvia Plath

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

 

Creation by Dara Prisamt Murray

From the first,
we had designs upon each other
licked out in salty patterns
on sex-sweated skin,

I painted your body
with a curly brush of copper hair
which, at times, you smoothed
back from my face
so that we could see ourselves
in true and unveiled mirrors,

your explorer's hands followed
every fold and contour
of my entire landscape, out and in,
causing me to liquify making you
a happy child again
with secret, candy-sticky fingers,

as my softness hardened you,
your stiffness melted me until
I, dripping around you and you,
deeply dipping inside me
found an undiscovered world
of land and water,

awakened and alive with wonder,
we created a sculpture
shimmering with love.

 

“Travel” by Leonard Cohen

Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought
Of travelling penniless to some mud throne
Where a master might instruct me how to plot
My life away from pain, to love alone
In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.

Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost
Enough to lose a way I had to take;
Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust
The will that forbid me contract, vow,
Or promise, and often while you slept
I looked in aw beyond your beauty.

Now
I know why many men have stopped and wept
Half-way between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere–
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.

 

The Coin
by
Sara Teasdale

Into my heart’s treasury
I slipped a coin
That time cannot take
Nor a thief purloin,
Oh better than the minting
Of a gold-crowned king
Is the safe-kept memory
Of a lovely thing.

 

Democracy by Langston Hughes