The Poetry Thread

[One Step Ahead]

interesting.   my favorite McKay poem is "America"
   
 
  Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

I don't know what my favorite  overall poem would be--certainly "We wear the Mask," "Dream deferred," "And Still I Rise" would all be in the top ten
 
 

[Rudy Huckleberry]

interesting.   my favorite McKay poem is "America"
   
 
  Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

I don't know what my favorite  overall poem would be--certainly "We wear the Mask," "Dream deferred," "And Still I Rise" would all be in the top ten
 
 

Yes, all good choices. If I had to rank the ones you listed I'd probably go: (1) And Still I Rise, (2) America, (3) We Wear the Mask, BIG GAP (4) Dream Deferred - although I like the first three so much it's not like the gap is between good to bad, it's more like super-favorite to very good.

[chlorinated]

Feast
by Tomaž Šalamun

By the way of all spheres,
on steep rocks overgrown with segments of color,
covered with chalk that children have broken,
we watch fragments
that keep rising,
compressed as if under the weight of water,
their slow takeoff: a signpost,
white curtains raised.

There is no hardship in breathing
precisely here, in this circle,
no hardship in breathing,
and also onward, ahead, it seems
as if balance is built in, unbreakable;
each time widening caves,
widening and narrowing,
like the activity of an unknown (unimaginable)
respiratory system, magnified under a microscope.

Invalid are nostalgia, night, melancholy,
laughter falling as snow,
everything parallel, everything there that can be
reached from here, all “the way” in between.

We are watching the reactions to this condition,
slowly, step by step, the outer leaves of the artichoke
float away.
We can imprint optional memories of notions.

There was a circle.
There was one just because we could not
use it.

Whatever the notion, they are all concentrically
disposed, far and near.
A freckle that was once an elevator
is a priori a ray, secured by intangibility.
Initiation is incredibly slow work,
similar to the turning of summer, winter, and stars.

Is this about how we have eaten?
Did we make a meal each time?

Enough so that in the process a tiny crack is left
and everything regenerates incredibly fast, and therefore now is.

You who keep a diary of growth and victims,
look!
Maybe many of them can read it,
light falls around,
only here of course nothing falls, it gets out.
The center, the source of energy watched by us
during this procedure, is empty. The cosmos makes the locus vanish,
eats it up. Energy, not consciousness, jumps across, (is)
in the negative. Therefore everything is in something,
what roughly, because of a notion, can be described
as a grain of sand, all space the remainder,
like dust after sawing wood.

On one cubic micron there are endless
galaxies, and each this enormous
space, nights, moons, suns, with constellations
that confound us, compressing our membrane.
The intergalactic and, of course, these
‘injected’ communications, too, are only oppression.

Along this window, in this window
there are innumerable other civilizations,
innumerable other cosmological systems.
Thus suffering does not matter,
layers do.
This is what I show here.

[seb7t]

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
(by Robert Hayden)


Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking,

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

[Stand under my Umbrella ella ella, aye!!]

Common-

Respiration

Yo...on The Amen, Corner I stood lookin at my former hood
Felt the spirit in the wind, knew my friend was gone for good
Threw dirt on the casket, the hurt, I couldn't mask it
Mixin down emotions, struggle I hadn't mastered
I coreograph seven steps to heaven
And hell, waiting to exhale and make the bread leavened
Veteran of a cold war It's Chica-I-go for
What I know or, what's known
So some days I take the bus home, just to touch home
From the crib I spend months gone
Sat by the window with a clutched dome listenin to shorties cuss long
Young girls with weak minds, but they butt strong
Tried to call, or at least beep the Lord, but didn't have a touch-tone
It's a dog-eat-dog world, you gotta mush on
Some of this land I must own
Outta the city, they want us gone
Tearin down the 'jects creatin plush homes
My circumstance is between Cabrini and Love Jones
Surrounded by hate, yet I love home
Ask my God how he thought travellin the world sound
Found it hard to imagine he hadn't been past downtown
It's deep, I heard the city breathe in its sleep
a reality I touch, but for me it's hard to keep
Deep, I heard my man breathe in his sleep
a reality I touch, but for me it's hard to keep

[P.U.S.H]

I loathe writing poetry myself, but love to listen. My friend posted this on FB a few days ago, and I watch it every day.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD-UpHlB9no

[seb7t]

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

i. LOVE. this. poem.


I think I've earmarked it in 3 different places in my Norton Anthology.

[Slim]

Beans, beans the musical fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot!
Beans, beans they are good for your heart.
The more you eat, the more you fart.
The more you fart, the more you eat,
The more you sit on the toilet seat!


 

[move] [/move]

[. . .]

One of my all time favorites:

Hope Is the Thing With Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

[GoldenAfro]

A favorite of mine...
 

Dulce Et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.