top of page

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

Not One, Not Two, But Three Poems, And Fifteen Copies of Our Book


That's right! I have the copies! Whenever you are ready, I am ready to start distributing. Let me know. mbt1966@yahoo.com


Here is the first poem of today. Enjoy!

The Sleeping Newt

 

I see him sleep in dampened grass.

It seems he does not dream.

I wonder how one’s time can pass

In such a boring scheme.

 

He stitches hours when he’s awake

To bind up what must be

But never has desire to make

A future prophecy.

 

In blackness of his vacant eyes,

My myths are overthrown,

For newts arise when fire dies

In fables not my own.

 

I watch him gobble up his tail

To set his spirit free.

Then, all his dreams that rise but fail

Begin and end in me.


That is a pretty nice little song! Ask me what it is about. I don't know. I saw a salamander and I wrote this poem. "Salamander" is too hard to fit into a rhythmic scheme, so it became "newt." Are newts and salamanders even the same thing?

Here is another.


Hope

 

Hope does not change

Nor help create.

It barely lasts a minute.

For when we hold

What we desire,

We place no more Hope in it.

 

Hope does not love

Nor help destroy.

In fact, it has no strength.

Hope is an act

Of hours and days

That weakens in its length.

 

She said of Hope,

It never stops

To change the tune it sings.*

I say of Hope

It flies away

On very slippery wings.

 

Much suffering

May give us Hope

That we will soon be free,

For when we die,

We have no Hope

And call it Victory.

 

*I refer to Ms. Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” is the thing with feathers. I might have changed her meaning a little.


As I wrote this poem, I was glancing through a book of 100 Favorite Poems, and I happened to flip to successive poems that were about hope. I am afraid that I agree with Alexander Pope that hoping often leads to inaction. Hope is not a bad thing, but when it replaces action, it is self-defeating.


Finally, here is a poem that expresses the way that I fell sometimes. Yeah, that's a joke!


Sometimes

 

Sometimes, wise voices gather in the wind

And fall to silence in a forest’s trees.

Sometimes, words hold me captive in their din

And free me only if and when they please.

 

Sometimes, the dim of night is agony

Because I lie awake and cannot dream.

Sometimes, a slimy sweat seeps over me

Because I stay asleep and cannot scream.

 

Sometimes, I wish to flesh I weren’t a slave

And I could be like meteors or mist.

Sometimes, the trek from cradle to the grave

Is only worth the while ‘cause I’ve been kissed.

 

Sometimes, a giddy hour turns to a yawn

And yesterday flies off on drowsy wings.

Sometimes, I stand and welcome the new dawn

And wonder what it is the robin sings.

 

Sometimes, I am a traveler

And, sometimes, I sit still.

I’d like to make the Essence stir.

I think, sometime, I will.


I hope that you have enjoyed these poems with me. I'll see you around sometime.

Comments


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

bottom of page