Seeking world peace and personal peace through poetry
David Jackson Love and Friendship
by Emily Bronte
Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?
The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?
Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He may still leave thy garland green.
The Definition Of Love
by Andrew Marvell
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrranic power depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced,
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.
As lines (so loves) oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
The Dole of the King’s Daughter
by Oscar Wilde
Seven stars in the still water,
And seven in the sky;
Seven sins on the King’s daughter,
Deep in her soul to lie.
Red roses at her feet,
(Roses are red in her red-gold hair)
And O where her bosom and girdle meet
Red roses are hidden there.
Fair is the knight who lieth slain
Amid the rush and reed,
See the lean fishes that are fain
Upon dead men to feed.
Sweet is the page that lieth there,
(Cloth of gold is goodly prey,)
See the black ravens in the air,
Black, O black as the night are they.
What do they there so stark and dead?
(There is blood upon her hand)
Why are the lilies flecked with red?
(There is blood on the river sand.)
There are two that ride from the south to the east,
And two from the north and west,
For the black raven a goodly feast,
For the King’s daughter to rest.
There is one man who loves her true,
(Red, O red, is the stain of gore!)
He hath duggen a grave by the darksome yew,
(One grave will do for four.)
No moon in the still heaven,
In the black water none,
The sins on her soul are seven,
The sin upon his is one.
Love’s Philosophy
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle –
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea –
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
Hello is anybody there are you listening at all what the hell’s wrong with you people, so the world is going crazy, it really is, it’s going crazy it can be and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it, I guess.
When I was born it wasn’t easier, even as the baby. The umbilical cord was still attached to me when I looked around I noticed that somebody was slapping me, and he turned out to be the doctor and he was holding me upside down. I was buck naked with everybody in that room looking at me, upside down and all.
It was certainly an ignominious beginning. It was November. They brought me home, put me in front of a coal stove, opened it up with the metal handle and threw some coal in it, smoke spit out and you could hear the coal in there cracking. That stuff was liable to crack and pop and knock a little piece of burning coal across the room. That stove would be red hot in the middle of the room, a wooden room, with newspapers glued to the wall. At about 2 AM, there would be no heat.
Well I guess since I’m talking to you, you might as well be listening, because everybody’s life is important, even mine, starting there in that little three room house with that fake brick asphalt siding . It was a little building my daddy got from Fort Campbell Kentucky. Three rooms, no water, no bathroom.
No bathroom was quite common back then. I can remember when going to school, there would be a role of outhouses all painted white and clean outside, go inside and there’d be the smell of lime. It wasn’t all that unsanitary at all, when it was done right. But the outhouse behind the little shack, or around most of the farmhouses, was a different story. You had to watch yourself in there. There is no telling what sort of critter could be in there with you, or looking up at you, so to speak. It was a cold run to the outhouse in the winter.
Well they brought me home that little three room house with the wooden porch and outhouse. I spent my young years playing in the dirt beneath the maple tree. Toys were scarce, you had to make your own. A horse was a tobacco stick with some twine. My leg I would sling high as I dismounted my horse and I would tie him to the post of the porch.
Those were my Dylan Thomas days as I was famous among the barn and shed.
David Michael Jackson
What Do Women Want?
by Kim Addonizio
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
Love’s Trinity
by Alfred Austin
Soul, heart, and body, we thus singly name,
Are not in love divisible and distinct,
But each with each inseparably link’d.
One is not honour, and the other shame,
But burn as closely fused as fuel, heat, and flame.
They do not love who give the body and keep
The heart ungiven; nor they who yield the soul,
And guard the body. Love doth give the whole;
Its range being high as heaven, as ocean deep,
Wide as the realms of air or planet’s curving sweep.
The Owl and the Pussy Cat
by Edward Lear
The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
