A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

Lady Chatterton

Swiper the fox wrote: »

Married with 4 kids under 7 I really get that poem, I said it before I love Wendy Cope, I'm going to have to get hold of some of her collections.

I'm a big fan of Wendy Cope too, I'd recommend - Two Cures for Love (Selected Poems - 1979 - 2006).

I reckon you'd probably like Fleur Adcock too.

Swiper the fox

Thanks for that, the Adcock poem you posted the other day was great also. Can anybody tell me what was the most thanked poem on this thread, I'd be very interested to know.

Here's an old poem I learned in school, probably didn't really understand it then but it means a lot now.


Bhí subh milis ar bháscrann an doras
ach mhúch mé an corraí
ionaim a d'éirigh
mar smaoinigh mé ar an lá
a bheadh an bháscrann glan
agus an lámh beag - ar iarraidh

There was sweet Jam on the doorhandle,
but I suppressed the anger that rose up inside me,
for I thought about the day when the doorhandle would be clean,
and the little hand gone.

Séamus Ó Neill

donegal_man

Cranky Old Man

What do you see nurses? . . .. . .What do you see?
What are you thinking .. . when you're looking at me?
A cranky old man, . . . . . .not very wise,
Uncertain of habit .. . . . . . . .. with faraway eyes?
Who dribbles his food .. . ... . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . .'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . .the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . .. . . A sock or shoe?
Who, resisting or not . . . ... lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . .The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking?. .Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse .you're not looking at me.
I'll tell you who I am . . . . .. As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, .. . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . .with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters .. . . .. . who love one another
A young boy of Sixteen . . . .. with wings on his feet
Dreaming that soon now . . .. . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . ..my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows .. .. .that I promised to keep.
At Twenty-Five, now . . . . .I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . .. . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . .. With ties that should last.
At Forty, my young sons .. .have grown and are gone,
But my woman is beside me . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, .. ...Babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . My loved one and me.
Dark days are upon me . . . . My wife is now dead.
I look at the future ... . . . . I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing .. . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . And the love that I've known.
I'm now an old man . . . . . . .. and nature is cruel.
It's jest to make old age . . . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles .. .. . grace and vigour, depart.
There is now a stone . . . where I once had a heart.
But inside this old carcass . A young man still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells
I remember the joys . . . . .. . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . . . life over again.
I think of the years, all too few . . .. gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people .. . . . .. . . open and see.
Not a cranky old man .
Look closer . . . . see .. .. . .. .... . ME!!

Anonymous

chasmcb

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

GreenGables

Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.

Imagine if your precious nose
were sandwiched in between your toes,
that clearly would not be a treat,
for you'd be forced to smell your feet.

Your nose would be a source of dread
were it attached atop your head,
it soon would drive you to despair,
forever tickled by your hair.

Within your ear, your nose would be
an absolute catastrophe,
for when you were obliged to sneeze,
your brain would rattle from the breeze.

Your nose, instead, through thick and thin,
remains between your eyes and chin,
not pasted on some other place--
be glad your nose is on your face!


Be Glad Your Nose is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky

chasmcb

THE SHIPFITTER'S WIFE

I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I'd go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I'd open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me—the ship's
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

Dorianne Laux

Dave!

The Mask of Anarchy

Rise like lions after slumber,
In unvanquishable number;
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fallen on you;
Ye are many -
They are few.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Earthhorse

That's just an extract from The Masque of Anarchy, it's not the whole poem!

Dave!

Whoops - that's what a friend plonked on my Facebook, I assumed that was the full thing.

Now I see why he only posted an extract - it's 10,000 stanzas long!

http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/the_mask_of_anarchy.htm

Dave!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7Al2HbIPQ

Earthhorse

Dave! wrote: »

Now I see why he only posted an extract - it's 10,000 stanzas long!

Where are you getting that number from? I don't think it's quite that long.

Dave!

I'm hyperbolisin'

Swiper the fox

For Rita With Love
by Pat Ingoldsby


You came home from school
on a special bus
full of people
who look like you
and love like you
and you met me
for the first time
and you loved me.
You love everybody
so much that it's not safe
to let you out alone.
Eleven years of love
and trust and time for you to learn
that you can't go on loving like this.
Unless you are stopped
you will embrace every person you see.
Normal people don't do that.
Some Normal people will hurt you
very badly because you do.

Cripples don't look nice
but you embrace them.
You kissed a wino on the bus
and he broke down and cried
and he said 'Nobody has kissed me
for the last 30 years.
But you did.
You touched my face
with your fingers and said
'I like you.'

The world will never
be ready for you.
Your way is right
and the world will never be ready. We could learn everything
that we need to know
by watching you
going to your special school
in your special bus
full of people
who look like you
and love like you
and it's not safe
to let you out alone.
If you're not normal
there is very little hope
for the rest of us.

Lady Chatterton

^^^^^^

Beautiful

donegal_man

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY - (a husband's point of view)

The missus bought a Paperback,
down Shepton Mallet way,
I had a look inside her bag;
... T'was "Fifty Shades of Grey".
Well I just left her to it,
And at ten I went to bed.
An hour later she appeared;
The sight filled me with dread...
In her left she held a rope;
And in her right a whip!
She threw them down upon the floor,
And then began to strip.
Well fifty years or so ago;
I might have had a peek;
But Mabel hasn't weathered well;
She's eighty four next week!!
Watching Mabel bump and grind;
Could not have been much grimmer.
And things then went from bad to worse;
She toppled off her Zimmer!
She struggled back upon her feet;
A couple minutes later;
She put her teeth back in and said
I am a dominater !!
Now if you knew our Mabel,
You'd see just why I spluttered,
I'd spent two months in traction
For the last complaint I'd uttered.
She stood there nude and naked
Bent forward just a bit
I went to hold her, sensual like
and stood on her left tit!
Mabel screamed, her teeth shot out;
My god what had I done!?
She moaned and groaned then shouted out:
"Step on the other one"!!
Well readers, I can't tell no more;
About what occurred that day.
Suffice to say my jet black hair,
Turned fifty shades of grey

Pam Ayres

Lady Chatterton

Seamus Heaney (RIP)

President and Taoiseach lead tributes to the late Seamus Heaney.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/president-and-taoiseach-lead-tributes-to-the-late-seamus-heaney-29539156.html

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

implausible

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Seamus Heaney

As a parent now, that last line brings a lump to my throat. Heaney's gift for capturing the ordinary intimacies of life is unmatched.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.

Swiper the fox

I won't be expecting much thanks for this one, it's the kind of poem which you need to revisit again and again.


The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious



There – but for the clutch of luck – go I.



At daybreak – in the arctic fog of a February daybreak –

Shoulder-length helmets in the watchtowers of the concentration camp

Caught me out in the intersecting arcs of the swirling searchlights.



There were at least a zillion of us caught out there –
Like ladybirds under a boulder –
But under the microscope each of us was unique,



Unique and we broke for cover, crazily breasting

The barbed wire and some of us made it

To the forest edge, but many of us did not



Make it, although their unborn children did –

Such as you whom the camp commandant branded

Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Jesus, break his fall:



There – but for the clutch of luck – go we all.


Paul Durcan

chasmcb

DOG FOX FIELD

[The test for feeblemindedness was they had to make up a sentence using the words dog, fox and field -Judgement at Nuremberg]

These were no leaders, but they were first
Into the dark on Dog Fox Field:

Anna who rocked her head, and Paul
who grew big and yet giggled small,

Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans
who knew his world as a fox knows a field.

Hunted with needles, exposed, unfed,
this time in their thousands they bore sad cuts

for having gazed, and shuffled, and failed
to field the lore of prey and hound

they then had to thump and cry in the vans
that ran while stopped in Dog Fox Field.

Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end,
they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field.

Les Murray

Swiper the fox

100 years tomorrow since this was first published in the Irish Times, my absolute favourite of the poems I studied for my leaving, these are usually the ones we have the greatest connection with, how much has changed in 100 years? I was at a house party a few years ago and there was a sing song, when one lad had to do his piece he recited this, it was amazing!





September 1913
by William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)

---

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

Dave!

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

---

I was reading this yesterday, and then watched an interesting talk about Frost & this poem specifically. My superficial interpretation of it may have been a bit off the mark, it seems! It makes the poem that bit more interesting actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5140uJOUDE

Dave!

I also like this one by Frost:


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


-Robert Frost

chasmcb

I like this Frost poem...

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Lady Chatterton

The Aerial

The aerial on this radio broke
A long, long time ago,
When you were just a name to me -
Someone I didn’t know.

The man before the man before
Had not yet set his cap
The day a clumsy gesture caused
That slender rod to snap.

Love came along. Love came along.
Then you. And now it’s ended.
Tomorrow I shall tidy up
And get the radio mended.

Wendy Cope

Harry Angstrom

Postscript: For Gweno by Alun Lewis

If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
'He has forgotten me'.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side;
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.

The Princess Bride

In darkened nights, he lived in fear.
He moved into the town last year.
He turned the key and locked the door,
And left his house for evermore.

The sun was sinking in the sky
I saw a teardrop in his eye
He said "let's go, it's getting late",
And he locked and chained the wooden gate.

We drove across the old glen road
And across the bleak Bull Bog.
His house was fading out of view
Through dusk and mountain fog.

He recalled how winter nights were spent
From advent until after Lent.
His house each night the men-folk came,
For songs and yarns and an old card game.

I knew his heart was sad and broke
He stared ahead and never spoke.
I brought his case into his room
He whispered "God Bless and safe journey home".

The neighbours see him when in town
And watch him wander up and down,
With bended head they see him roam
His thoughts still of,his mountain home.

canadianwoman

Strangers when we meet by Donna Barber



we meet as strangers
although we think we know each other
inside out

our bodies touch
embrace
even in the act
of coitus
we remain
two separate spaces
momentarily fused together

Swiper the fox

EILY KILBRIDE


On the north side of Cork city
where I sported and played
On the banks of my own lovely Lee
Having seen the goat break loose in Grand Parade.

I met a child Eily Kilbride
Who's never heard of marmalade,
Whose experience of breakfast
Was coldly limited,

Whose entire school day
Was a bag of crisps,
Whose parents had no work to do,
Who went, once, into the countryside,
Saw a horse with a feeding bag over its head
And thought it was sniffing glue.

Brendan Kennelly

Swiper the fox

With a bit of time to kill I was interested in discovering what was the most popular(thanked) poem in this thread, there seemed no easy way to do it so I've spent the last 10 minutes or so scanning the pages. There is a runaway winner, Post number 6 thanked by 15 people, nothing else even got 10. The winner is

Antarctica
‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He leaves them reading and begins to climb,
Goading his ghost into the howling snow;
He is just going outside and may be some time.

The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime
And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Need we consider it some sort of crime,
This numb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,
He is just going outside and may be some time

In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,
Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Derek Mahon

chasmcb

Mahon's 'Antarctica' reminds me of this one by Joseph Brodsky

A Polar Explorer

All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary, And the beads of quick
words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.