Poetry Thread

Never have I seen a poem as lovely as a tree.

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar
{written by a homesick Australian in England in 1861, every Australian is familiar with it}

Originally posted by Kewpie
The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I lo ...[text shortened]... lar
{written by a homesick Australian in England in 1861, every Australian is familiar with it}

I have tried, put effort, and don't get it. There is this hollow spot.

Originally posted by apathist
I have tried, put effort, and don't get it. There is this hollow spot.

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

(Billy Collins)

A popular one:

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

They f*** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were f***ed up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

The Oven Bird

There is a singer eveyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

(Robert Frost)

Tamzin Merchant:

Ode to a Toilet

I’ve never failed to notice how
Loos are generally excluded
From literature and suchlike,
And so I have concluded:

In general, as a Nation, we
Refrain from using ‘poo’ or ‘pee’
As a legitimate and pressing plight
For characters to exit downstage right

For when did Superman ever say
“Just a sec, love, don’t go away,
Hang on that ledge another mo
Coz when you gotta go, you gotta go!”

Likewise, Shakespeare never proclaim’d
“The human psyche is thus maim’d,
When one hath many things to do,
One always just pops to the loo.”

Caesar never said during orations
“Hang on there, plebs, hold your stations
Your imperial highness will be back in a bit
But just right now, I’m off to the Pit.”

Harry Potter and Friends don’t have time to poo,
Cos they’re always fighting You-Know-Who
They’re far too busy with that three-headed dog
To have time to pay a visit to the Bog.

And Frankenstein’s creature (so people thought)
Was never (lucky sod) caught short.
And so yours truly writes in conclusion:
There is a good deal of toilet confusion

Don’t be deceived by the characters you see
(From the Frodos to the Captain Cooks)
And here’s some advice to you from me:
Don’t believe everything you read in books.

Originally posted by Ponderable

Tamzin Merchant:

[b]Ode to a Toilet

I’ve never failed to notice how
Loos are generally excluded
From literature and suchlike,
And so I have concluded:

In general, as a Nation, we
Refrain from using ‘poo’ or ‘pee’
As a legitimate and pressing plight
For characters to exit downstage right

For when did Superman ever say
“Just ...[text shortened]... tain Cooks)
And here’s some advice to you from me:
Don’t believe everything you read in books.[/b]