Post your favorite poems!

[Scar Marble]

Hello whippersnappers* and not-so-whippersnappers. I adore poetry with all my heart. It has been the thing I return to, time and time again, whenever I feel lost or depressed or anything really. Somehow it has the ability to ‘set me right’. Sometimes I am just reading it bc I feel good and I want to, and it enhances that too.

I bought a book of Anne Sexton’s selected poems the other day (called Mercies) and this one that I am about to post - if you will just hold your horses for ONE SECOND - is the one that made me want to. I haven’t read much from her but finally I am feeling drawn to her stuff. Here is the aforementioned poem that I previously mentioned I would post:


From the Garden

Come, my beloved,
consider the lilies.
We are of little faith.
We talk too much.
Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.
Let us consider the view:
a house where white clouds
decorate the muddy halls.
Oh, put away your good words
and your bad words. Spit out
your words like stones!
Come here! Come here!
Come eat my pleasant fruits.


It’s a beauty, isn’t it?

Spoiler

*I thought 'whippersnapper' just meant 'young person' but I just looked it up and apparently it means way more than that (like 'cocky' etc). I should change it but it is way too fun a word. I want to use it. So there.

[close]

[mir]

I don't read poetry that much, but this is a poem that I've come to really like after coming across it in a novel I was reading:

Animal Crackers by Christopher Morley

Animal crackers and cocoa to drink,
That is the finest of suppers, I think;
When I'm grown up and can have what I please
I think I shall always insist upon these.
What do YOU choose when you're offered a treat?
When Mother says, 'What would you like best to eat?'
Is it waffles and syrup, or cinnamon toast?
It's cocoa and animals that I love most!

The kitchen's the cosiest place that I know;
The kettle is singing, the stove is aglow,
And there in the twilight, how jolly to see
The cocoa and animals waiting for me.

Daddy and Mother dine later in state,
With Mary to cook for them, Susan to wait;
But they don't have nearly as much fun as I
Who eat in the kitchen with Nurse standing by;
And Daddy once said, he would like to be me
Having cocoa and animals once more for tea.

source

there was a time when it was difficult for me to eat... many things to say about meals as rituals.

[sherm]

This is one of my favorites, I keep trying to write a tagline but I can't reduce the way it makes me feel to mere words   
Under One Small Star by Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Such a journey,