To ask for your favourite poem

[Rebeccaslicker]

I was just going to post this on the "middle aged woman is too old for fairy lights" thread - but it's being zapped for GF-ery!

So here is one of my favourite poems:

www.barbados.org/poetry/wheniam.htm

I like it because I think the imagery and the humour are fantastic. Anyone else like poetry? What do you like - I love reading poetry so would be great to find some new stuff :)

We used this Flanders and Swan song, read as a poem at my Dad's funeral. He was a steam train fanatic and restored engines as a hobby
www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/frankturner/theslowtrain.html

Wish You Were

by Colette Bryce

Here, an aftertaste of traffic taints

the city’s breath, as mornings

yawn and bare this street

like teeth. Here, airplanes leaving

Heathrow scare this house

to trembling; these rooms protect

their space with outstretched walls,

and wait. And evenings fall

like discs in a jukebox, playing

a song called Here, night after night.

Wish you were. Your postcards

land in my hall like meteorites.

A Baby Sardine - Spike Milligan

A baby sardine saw her first submarine
She was scared and watched through a peephole.
"Oh come, come, come," said the sardine's mum.
"It's only a tin full of people."

Late Lovepoem by Jackie Kay

How they strut about, people in love,
how tall they grow, pleased with themselves,
their hair, glossy, their skin shining.
They don't remember who they have been.

How filmic they are just for this time.
How important they've become – secret, above
the order of things, the dreary mundane.
Every church bell ringing, a fresh sign.

How dull the lot that are not in love.
Their clothes shabby, their skin lustreless;
how clueless they are, hair a mess; how they trudge
up and down streets in the rain,

remembering one kiss in a dark alley,
a touch in a changing-room, if lucky, a lovely wait
for the phone to ring, maybe, baby.
The past with its rush of velvet, its secret hush

already miles away, dimming now, in the late day.

I once had to learn a poem for school and I chose this one. It's been my favourite ever since :)

Well Bread - Spike Milligan

If you cast your bread on the waters,
It returns a thousand fold,
So it says in the Bible,
That’s what I’ve been told.

(So) I cast my bread on the waters,
It was spotted by a froggy,
And the bits of bread he didn’t eat
Just floated back all soggy.

thelikelylass I love Brian Patten! Gave a book of his Love Poems to MrScipio many years ago.

Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear
Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair
Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy
Wuzz he?

This is my kind of thread!
Lots of favourites already here. I especially love "When You Are Old and Grey" by WB Yeats above. Another gorgeous poem from Heaney:

‘When all the others were away at Mass’

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

One more Morse's poem The Remorseful Day by Housman:

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.

How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Teaching poetry is the best bit of KS4 for me! I'm so lucky to get paid for it.
So many favourites...I can't choose one, love Cousin Kate and Goblin Market equally.
And Duffy's Valentine.

Guacamole Pigs

Hallo. I ham Don Pepe.
Thees is my mustache.
Thees is my restaurant.
And these is my free guacamole.
Thas right. I said free guacamole. The cheeps
however are wan meelyun dollars.
But some people don care—they will eat
the guacamole straight from the bowl
with their feelthy hands. They don care
who sees. The guacamole is beeger
than their family, their pride, their God.
I call these people guacamole peegs.
I study the eyes of people in the street,
waiteen for buses—in the marketplace,
buyeen bananas. I wan to know them
on sight because these peegs know
of no life outside their blind lust
for green goop. There is no end
to how hard they will fack you.

Phenomenal woman by Maya Angelou. And even better when you see her perform it.

m.poemhunter.com/poem-amp/phenomenal-woman/

From my childhood, my mum used to read me the Skipperyboo by Earl Newton. Shed read it in such a dramatic way you'd be gripped by the story and then fall about laughing at the way she pronounced Skipperyboo.

In adulthood, my favourite poet and author Edgar Allan Poe's Dream within a Dream.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

I was going to say "Mid Term Break" too but it's been posted.
That last line ....

And this one - "Follower" which seems a bit cruel when first read but I think shows the subtle changes when the parent/child relationship becomes reversed ....

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
Seamus Heaney

I love so much poetry but this is the very simple and beautiful one that I always come back to. It reminds me of my mum who I miss so much. She loved it too.

You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.

You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.

And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth
you will give me hope.

And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.

For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you.

(This is from House Of Leaves by Danielewski)

Someone posted the most beautiful sad poem on another MN thread, called The Two Headed Calf. I've never forgotten it.

Neutral tones by Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter's day
And the sun was white as though chidden by god
A few leaves lay on the starving sod,
They had fallen from an ash and were grey.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago
And some words played between us to and fro
On which list the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby,
Like an ominous bird a-wing.

Since then keen lessons that love deceives
And wrings with wrongs, have shaped to me
Your face, and the god-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with greyish leaves.

I’m descended from seafarers on both sides. My great great grandfather captained a whaler. Any military history is naval. My favourite poem is Sea Fever.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54932/sea-fever-56d235e0d871e

The Two-Headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

This one ^ Clawdy ?

More Larkin. I find this so incredibly evocative.

Friday night at the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

Weeds, that F&S Song reduces me to tears within seconds. I come from the Millers Dale and Tideswell line..

I love Cavafy, especially this one, Ithaca.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec