To ask you to tell me your favourite poet/poem

[Ethelfleda]

I’ve always been quite dense on the topic
I till recently reading ‘The Road Not Taken’ which I loved! I have started to read a little more and am really getting in to it!
So thought I would ask the great MN collective about favourite poets/poems/anthologies

My favourite poem is by Martin Neimoller. It’s called ‘First They Came’

It is so profound to me.

Benjamin Zephaniah

A Considered Reply To A Child by Jonathan Price

Lots of my other favourites on here.

If you haven’t already picked up on it, on Twitter Sam West (@exithelemming) has since the start of the lockdown been posting recordings of 3 #PandemicPoems a day. I think there are more than 500 on soundcloud now, with lots of the ones mentioned here included.

I think this is the link (but I’m not very technical so sorry if it fails!)

soundcloud.com/user-115260978/sets/pandemic-poems-by-samuel-west

Sorry - his twitter name is exitthelemming

This one made me cry recently, although I was quite tired/hormonal!
Blessing for a Child

Yes, there will be times when you will have to fight.

We cannot spare you that. But then, there might

be times when you can hardly breathe for laughing.

There might be frogs in ponds to wonder at, and bumblebees

and opportunities to disappear your toes in sinking sands.

Later on, there might be days when chestnut trees are still and fat

beside a river, or the motorway. There might be beer

in paper cups, and people throwing frisbees in the park.

You might come cold and tired from work, to find

that someone's run a bath. You might see hawthorn

in an English hedgerow; catch an urban dawn

or go to bed quite drunk, with arms around you;

might feed a private hedgehog by the door one night.

There might be snowfall, bonfires, dragonflies: a hug.

And yes, there will be rain but then, there might

be rainbows. We'll be with you. You will be alright.
Jo Bell

Brian Bilston's poems absolutely crack me up - he posts them daily on Twitter and they always make me laugh.

I absolutely love Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. As an English teacher it is my favourite poem to teach as it's a true story and an unsolved mystery to this day - I love all the conspiracy theories pupils come out with 😂

I also love Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson, Medusa by Duffy and most poems by Christina Rossetti.

A baby sardine.

S. Milligan.

A baby sardine saw her first submarine
She was scared as she watched through a peephole
Oh come, come, come!
Said the sardines mum
It's only a tin full of people.

Aubade by Philip Larkin

Stopping By Woods On A Winter’s Evening by Robert Frost

Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Larkin and Eliot (hence the username) for me. And Carver and Walcott. And Boland and Hughes.
Too many to post so perhaps just two. The first I found recently and helped me a lot at the beginning of Lockdown. The second is for anyone who has ever lost themselves.

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
John O'Donohue.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Walcott

The Jabberwocky. It reminds me of my Grandad.

I was just about to say Stopping by woods too Great minds!

I also love From a Railway Carriage and Something told the Wild Geese.

I loved poetry as a child - my Grandma bought me some amazing anthologies and we used to read them together.
I loved the Cargoes poem quoted above.
She also introduced me to Pam Ayers
I used to do Speech and Drama and I loved reciting Robert Frost, I also love the poetry in Shakespeare plays.
I like poems, generally, that are full of mysterious words that trip off the tongue.
I do also adore The Night Mail which trips off the tongue fabulously.
And of course The More it Snows (Tiddly Pom)

However my all time favourite poem is Funeral Blues - WH Auden (It's the one read in 4 Weddings but I knew it long before that)

I’ve always loved The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I first heard it on the radio when I was about 8-10 yrs & have never forgotten it & that’s at least 55yrs ago. I’ve read a lot more poetry since then but that still has a special place in my heart.

[FudgeBrownie] thank you so much, I posted before I’d rtft and when I went back to read the posts, there it was, every word. That’s made my evening.

I also absolutely love Donal Og, as the previous poster has quoted.

There is a beautiful Hollie McNeish poem about the struggle of being a toddler which is also very moving, I can't quite be bothered to go down & find it.

This one by Robert Haydon reminds me of my dad getting up early to work when I was young (though he was an 80s management consultant not the gritty character described here!)

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?

I won a competition reciting the Highwayman when I was 9! Still very proud.

BEATTIE IS THREE Adrian Mitchell

At the top of the stairs
I ask for her hand. O.K.
She gives it to me.
How her fist fits my palm,
A bunch of consolation.
We take our time
Down the steep carpetway
As I wish silently
That the stairs were endless.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott a big favourite, makes me sob sometimes, on sad days.
Atlas by UA Fanthorpe describes my idea of love.

Don’t put mustard in the Custard, Michael Rosen. This will always sum up raising my DC, the line “Don’t throw fruit at the computer” was family speak for “behave yourself“. It still makes us all smile. What a lovely thread. Reading the Highwayman brought a real lump to my throat, I W as right back there, all those years ago, listening to the radio with my mum.

I had to go and get the Hollie Mcneish as I couldn't get to sleep as it was bugging me! It's the end of a poem called "Toddlers and Teenagers" describing how they both cause tantrums and troubles. And the last four lines make me cry:

as they try so very hard to safely let us go
and make their own rough-weeded path
stepping slowly day by day
a little further from our grasp.

As many people have noted, WB Yeats's The Second Coming might have been written to describe the situation we are currently in. But he wrote some very tender poems, too, of which my favourite is Broken Dreams.

Phillip Larkin - This Be The Verse
Roger McGough - The Lesson
The Lion and Albert Monologues - Marriott Edgar
Jenny Joseph - When I Am Old

Sorry, I don't think that link works. Try this: www.bartleby.com/148/25.html

@ABoxersMum - I remember being very amused when reading A Series of Unfortunate Events to my daughters that there was a lengthy, detailed allusion to This Be the Verse, albeit without the famous first line.

John Hegley
John Cooper Clarke