Poems that you love

[Iliveinanoodie]

Thank you to the poster who uploaded the Wendy Cope poem on another thread. I didn't get time to respond before the thread was taken down.
Anyone got any short poems that they love? Please share.

The poet writes after witnessing the burning of her village

What They Did Yesterday Afternoon
Warsan Shire

Later that night
I held an Atlas in my lap
Ran my fingers across the
whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

It answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

Great thread.

Mine is (an excerpt from a longer poem):

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.
By Susan Coolidge

Some days were running legs

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates
with day’s companions: and dew falling
on heads clear of ambition except light
returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green
pasture: and horses turning to the wind
bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising
sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning
strike with eel’s speed out of the storm.
Black the roman rooks came from the left squawking
and the evening flowed back around their wings.

Iain Crichton Smith

Dangerous Coats by Sharon Owens.

I've always liked Before You Were Mine by Carol Ann Duffy. It was in my GCSE anthology and I kept it just for that poem.

'Snow'
LOUIS MACNEICE

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

One I like, reminds me of the number of times I felt no-one could see me struggle, needing help. People always assumed I was doing ok but sometimes I needed that outstretched hand.

Not Waving but Drowning

BY STEVIE SMITH
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

I love this one by Bunmi Laditan

I carry your heart with me EE 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)

I’ve thought of another one…I grew up in a strange household full of books and spent lots of time as I child reading poetry (I know 🙈) anyway, this one used to TERRIFY me as a child, so atmospheric. I like a lot of Walter de la mere



Sylvia Plath: Poppies In July

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker.
I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames.
Nothing burns

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless.
Colorless.

This was a poem I studied for English Lit A level many moons ago and it still has the same power it had the first time I read it. Beautiful.

@newrubylane my OH has a favourite about Orkney (nothing on telly so I'm going through some of these with him)

His take on Orkney

Bloody Orkney
This bloody town's a bloody cuss
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody roads are bloody bad,
The bloody folks are bloody mad,
They'd make the brightest bloody sad,
In bloody Orkney.
All bloody clouds, and bloody rains,
No bloody kerbs, no bloody drains,
The Council's got no bloody brains,
In bloody Orkney.

Everything's so bloody dear,
A bloody bob, for bloody beer,
And is it good? - no bloody fear,
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody 'flicks' are bloody old,
The bloody seats are bloody cold,
You can't get in for bloody gold
In bloody Orkney.

The bloody dances make you smile,
The bloody band is bloody vile,
It only cramps your bloody style,
In bloody Orkney.

No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun, the bloody dames
Won't even give their bloody names
In bloody Orkney.

Best bloody place is bloody bed,
With bloody ice on bloody head,
You might as well be bloody dead,
In bloody Orkney
There's nothing greets your bloody eye
But bloody sea and bloody sky,
'Roll on demob!' we bloody cry
In bloody Orkney.

Hamish Blair

Haven’t read whole thread so maybe a repeat, but I think this is my ultimate favourite:

A WISH FOR MY CHILDREN

On this doorstep I stand
year after year
to watch you going

and think: May you not
skin your knees. May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.

May tide and weather
wait for your coming

and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving.

-Evangeline Paterson

I have always loved MacNeice's work

Sunlight on the Garden
by Louis Macneice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too for sunlight on the garden.

I rely on you
I rely on you
Like a Skoda needs suspension
Like the aged need a pension
Like a trampoline needs tension
Like a bungee jump needs apprehension
I rely on you
I rely on you
Like a camera needs a shutter
Like a golfer needs a putter
Like a gambler needs a flutter
Like a buttered scone involves butter
I rely on you
I rely on you
Like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve
Like a hairpin needs a drastic curve
Like an HGV needs endless DERV
Like an outside left needs a body swerve
I rely on you
I rely on you
Like a handyman needs pliers
Like an auctioneer needs buyers
Like a laundromat needs dryers
Like The Good Life needed Richard Briers
I rely on you
Like a water vole needs water
Like a brick outhouse needs mortar
Like a lemming to the slaughter
Ryan’s just Ryan – without his daughter
I rely on you

Hovis Presley (RIP)

contraversial one but I love 'the love that dares to speak its name'

I WANNA BE YOURS
I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
Let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours
I wanna be your raincoat
For those frequent rainy days
I wanna be your dreamboat
When you want to sail away
Let me be your teddy bear
Take me with you anywhere
I don’t care
I wanna be yours
I wanna be your electric meter
I will not run out
I wanna be the electric heater
You’ll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion
Hold your hair in deep devotion
Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean
That’s how deep is my devotion

John Cooper Clarke

My DD (Arctic monkeys fan) was most impressed when she was singing their track to this and I already knew the words

I love Owen Sheers' Mametz Wood (WW1)

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.
This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

John Betjeman Poems
Back to Poems Page

How To Get On In Society by John Betjeman
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

Everything Brian Patten has written but this one doesn't make me cry (often!!)

Dear Mum,
While you were out
A cup went and broke itself,
A crack appeared in the blue vase
Your great-great grandad
Brought back from Mr Ming in China. Somehow, without me even turning on the tap, The sink mysteriously overflowed.
A strange jam-stain,
About the size of a boy’s hand,
Appeared on the kitchen wall.
I don’t think we will ever discover
Exactly how the cat
Managed to turn on the washing-machine (especially from the inside),
or how Sis’s pet rabbit went and mistook
the waste-disposal unit for a burrow.
I can tell you I was scared when,
As if by magic,
A series of muddy footprints
Appeared on the new white carpet.
I was being good
(honest)
but I think the house is haunted so,
knowing you’re going to have a fit,
I've gone over to Gran’s for a bit.

Sorry, but I hate this poem. People always miss out the last few lines (as you have) and read it at weddings. It's about infidelity and makes me cringe every time. It ends:

'I don't wanna be hers
I wanna be yours'

For all parents .......

Walking Away
For Sean
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone can perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
C. Day Lewis