some of my favorite poems
"but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for!"
I don’t think I talk a lot about poetry, but that’s mainly because I don’t read them a lot. I prefer prose because it’s more concrete, something that I can grasp and immediately ingrain in my mind. Poetry is usually more complex, more embellished—an exercise in patience, and I’m not a patient person at all.
But maybe poetry was something I had to grow into because it’s recently become something that I love. I love seeing words turn into sentences turn into a melody, a symphony. Each poem is so uniquely different and I find myself tuning in on the language and structure. I can slow down time and focus on every word without subconsciously having to think of the plot or keep track of characters.
In such a fast moving world, poetry has become almost antidotal. It is an exercise in patience still, but I am trying to learn how to do that. I wrote about solitude this week for my postcard, and poetry is one of the things that allows me to truly appreciate it.
Here are some favorite poems of mine!
i carry your heart by E.E. Cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
What I Didn’t Know Before by Ada Limón
was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.
Diary Entry [6th January 1923] by Fernando Pessoa
I don't know who I am right now. I dream.
Steeped in feeling myself, I sleep. In this
Calm hour my thought forgets its thinking,
My soul has no soul.
If I exist, it's wrong to know it. If I
Wake up, I feel I'm mistaken. I just don't know.
There's nothing I want, have, or remember.
I have no being or law.
A moment of consciousness between illusions,
I'm bounded all around by phantoms.
Sleep on, oblivious to other people's hearts,
O heart belonging to no one!
Adult Grief by Louise Glück
Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child's love.
Now, of course, it's too late—
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they'd endured.
If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time's past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I've seen you press your face against the granite markers—
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow, you will not let yourself
obliterate anything.
Sonnet 19 by William Shakespeare
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.