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Please tell me your favorite poem? The o...
Please tell me your favorite poem? The one you come back to, think about, can’t ever let go of.
25d
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108 responses
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Robin
1d
Replies & Seconds
Billy Collins "The Lanyard"
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I still remember exactly where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing when I read the final stanza. that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
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1
Marla Darwin
9d
Poetry
Antidotes to Fear of Death
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Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars. Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp. Sometimes, instead, I stir myself Into a universe still young, Still warm as blood: No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form. And sometime it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones: To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls, Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings. By Rebecca Elson
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2
Good Thing Going by Lena Dunham
10d
writer stuff
What the Living Do (Marie Howe)
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When I don’t have the right words to share with someone who is experiencing the wilds of grief, I will often share this poem. I first read it when I was a 14 year old grappling with my first true loss, and - unlike so many works of art we love as tweens - it has never faded or started to look cheesy or saccharine. It’s a perfect thing, growing lovelier each year.
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Argina
13d
Inspiration: What Keeps The ...
won’t you celebrate with with me - Lucille Clifton
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won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
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Cecilia
14d
good bones by Maggie smith
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grounded and hopeful in a way I can accept for myself
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amy wesson
16d
my dead friends by marie howe
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5
2
Kadie
17d
Fear by Kahlil Gibran
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As a person who isn’t much drawn to poetry I found this one particularly moving during a yoga practice: It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
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1
1
Ms. Misc.
17d
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
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“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
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6
Donna
18d
“Flower in a crannied wall “ Tennyson
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Sums up life
1
Aya C
18d
Rec responses
Weathering by Fleur Adcock
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One I’m thinking about lately. Especially the idea of how I look merely being what my soul may wear.
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4
tviolet9
18d
Scheherazade by Richard Siken, a masterpiece of a poem
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there is something hauntingly romantic yet raw about the poem “Scheherazade.” The first time I read Crush, the book it comes from, I was stunned by Siken’s use of language and structure in his poetry. In my point of view, it evokes how the look and feel of a bruise’s tender pain and beauty.
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3
cheekybean
18d
“Masks” by Shel Silverstein
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🥲
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Luba
19d
This Is Just To Say
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By William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
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5
Bianca
19d
What I Didn’t Know Before by Ada Limón
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7
Owen Brown
19d
I don't have a favorite, I come back to many poems, often, I memorize them and forget them, but here is Roethke's The Waking, which is a stunner.
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I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.
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1
Allie
19d
The Library
desiderata by Max Ehrmann
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And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
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2
chiarabelle
20d
books, shows and movies
The Act (William Carlos Williams)
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Just beautiful.
4
Janet Wallace
15w
Read & Write!
A Word on Statistics trs. by Joanna Trzeciak
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A favorite poem on statistics.
2
K8
20d
Meditations in an Emergency
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“Like you, I was raised on the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.”
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7
Kate
21d
One that comes to mind - A Shropshire lad, XL
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Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. -A. E. Housman
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1
Blythe Sheldon
21d
Words
Excerpt from “The Cave of Making” (W. H. Auden)
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An editor I worked with in 2003 quoted this bit from Auden's "The Cave of Making" once and it remains one of the most astonishing and damning things I've heard and read in my life.
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2
Blythe Sheldon
21d
Words
Don't Leave a Good Time Looking for a Good Time by Michael Bazzett
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A poem that has stuck with me for the sustained dry humor and how the story unfolds, from the incongruous ponytail and philosophizing to the zinger at the end. As a bonus, I get a whiff of classic country music with the whiskey and takes on "I ain't here for a long time, here for a good time" and "I've been playin' possum / I've been a-watchin' you."
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6
Persephone
21d
One Art, Elizabeth Bishop
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This poem is about the brittle, easily-shattered armor we put on to defend ourselves from unbearable loss. Easy come, easy go, we say in lilting voices, hoping nonchalance will help us live. We are, of course, chalant AF — and have to force ourselves to believe (WRITE IT!) that we can carry on losing and living and breathing and loving without the world exploding around us. As I get older and losses mount, I think of this poem and it bolsters me.
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6
Cristina Sciarra
18w
Reading / Listening
Of Your Father's Indiscretions and the Train to California | Lynn Emanuel
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My favorite poem by my favorite poet
4
Nitabel
21d
great library
Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree (Sarah Lindsay)
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He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming of a tree, dreaming of a tree and its sound like a hush, and it seemed he could open his mouth when he woke and make the others know something they didn’t already know, his tree. But he woke and he couldn’t. He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree of his arms and called to the others, but all he could say, all they could say, was tree, not that one, no, not here, tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on. Later a leopard dragged him some distance and left him on the remains of his back, his plucked face tilted up, and a seed fell on the stub of his tongue in his open mouth. Took root, sent a finger between his teeth that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed on what was in his braincase and mixed with the sky, and made a sound in the wind that was almost what he wanted.
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3
1
Paula
21d
Wild Geese by Mary J Oliver
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"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things."
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8
Sungmi
21d
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by e. e. cummings
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r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath PPEGORHRASS eringint(o- aThe):l eA !p: S a (r rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs) to rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper;
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Nitabel
22d
great library
To Be Alive (Gregory Orr)
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To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That's crudely put, but... If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?
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7
Rajhesh Panchanadhan
22d
wordworthy
Psalm of Life
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The rhythm, the meter, the message, and a goad to action
Shannon
22d
Desire Song - Albert Goldbarth
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The graspy heart, that lobster of ours that wants, and wants, and is evolved to lust for one grain shat by a swallow in flight as much as the whole packed four-story silo. There’s a cloud across the moon tonight like the skin boiled milk gets cooling—slightly blue and slightly wrinkled. I want the glass of warm milk from my childhood carried up to the crib by a living Grandma Nettie with her hair still singed in odor from the frightening tines of her old-fashioned curler, yes, and I want the moon in its entirety, the moon though the windshield detailing Phyllis’s breast for me the first time it was more than a wish or a centerfold peeked in private, yes, I want the moth of faint veins holding her nipple, the coruscations it made in stiffening, casting complicated shadows within itself not unlike the moon, which I want, and that ‘63 Chevy we parked in, which I want, and the father who loaned it to me that night, who I want waiting up for me, walking the planet instead of being one more battery slipped inside it, powering the rest of us, who are sweating our sheets with our wanting. Michael tells me: in the slammer— call it what you like, the pen, the hoosegow, the big house, call it shit city— you want anything from outside, and a used-up tube of lipstick or the one-eyed spaniel’s water pan can hold the same desire a limousine does. He’s seen kneeling men lick cell bars for the salt a visitor’s palm left. Think of the rib cage… think of the lobster clacking inside its trap. Albert Goldbarth, “Desire Song,” Across the Layers: Poems Old and New (University of Georgia Press, 1993)
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2
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Jamy
22d
acceptance speech after setting the world record in goosebumps by Andrea Gibson
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5
2
Tahryn
22d
responses
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
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Found this poem in high school and it wrecked me. It finds new ways to wreck me with every passing year.
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13
Lucy
22d
Hera Lindsay Bird's Pyramid Scheme
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Silly, rambling, profound
4
Sarah
22d
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
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“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore”
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5
Sara
22d
feel like a human
So Much Happiness
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A poem, an image, an idea, that I read on a friend's bathroom wall decades ago and that I've since carried with me everywhere, always by Naomi Shihab Nye Here is all of it: So Much Happiness It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . . Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.
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10
1
Nick
22d
This Be The Verse
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It's so cynical and funny and helps me as a parent realize I will make mistakes.
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5
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