Do You Have a Favorite Poem?

I am almost three years late to this post, and it is still relevant! I only just discovered your blog, and am enjoying immensely (I just subscribed to received your e-newsletter… <3)

I am a long-time lover of poetry, with too many favorite poets to name. A handful: Naomi Shihab Nye, Wendell Berry, Sharon Olds, William Stafford, Ellen Bass. Here's one of hers:

Everything on the Menu by Ellen Bass

In a poem it doesn’t matter
if the house is dirty. Dust
that claims the photographs like a smothering
love. Sand spilled from a boy’s sneaker,
the faceted grains scattered on the emerald rug
like the stars and planets of a tiny
solar system. Monopoly
butted up against Dostoyevsky.
El techo, a shiny sticker, labeling the ceiling
from the summer a nephew studied Spanish.
Mold on the bread in the refrigerator
is as interesting as lichen on an oak –
its miniscule hairs like the fuzz
on an infant’s head, its delicate
blues and spring greens, its plethora of spores,
whole continents of creatures, dazzling in our palms.

In a poem, life and death are equals.
We receive the child, crushed
like gravel under the tire.
And the grandfather at the open grave
holding her small blue sweatshirt to his face.
And we welcome the baby born
at daybreak, the mother naked, squatting
and pushing in front of the picture window
just as the garbage truck roars up
and the men jump out, clanking
the metal cans into its maw.

In a poem, we don’t care if you got hired
or fired, lost or found love,
recovered or kept drinking.
You don’t have to exercise
or forgive. We’re hungry.
We’ll take everything on the menu.

In poems joy and sorrow are mates.
They lie down together, their hands
all over each other, fingers
swollen in mouths,
nipples chafed to flame, their sexes
fitting seamlessly as day and night.
They arch over us, glistening and bucking,
the portals through which we enter our lives.

A timeless poem:

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost – 1874-1963

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

This haiku by Bashō.

Even in Kyoto –
hearing the cuckoo’s cry –
I long for Kyoto.

It’s the closest I can come to describing the lingering nostalgia I feel for time spent with my baby as a new mother.

I’m late to this but here’s one that never fails to make me Content Breath. The Orange by Wendy Cope:

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

My favorite poem is a Greek one called Ithaka, by C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her, you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

I am still reading through all the comments so I don’t know if someone has posted this one already (also, THANK YOU for this post. I keep coming back to it in between reading terrible things about children being separated from their parents and the Supreme Court and everything else.) This poem is a newer favorite, and only discovered now that I have three sons. I was reading through my book of Michael Ondaatje poems looking for “7 or 8 Things I Know About Her – a Stolen Biography”, and was reminded that my best friend was the first person to send me Ondaatje’s poetry and it was such a wonderful discovery and now I think of her every time I read it. That poem, a little too long for the comments, can be found here on someone’s livejournal site https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/289600.html

Griffin of the Night
by Michael Ondaatje

I’m holding my son in my arms
sweating after nightmares
small me
fingers in his mouth
his other fist clenched in my hair
small me
sweating after nightmares.

I will never not think of this poem.

A Letter

I have been wondering
What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
It is certainly not me.
But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.

Of course, it is talking of you.
At dawn, where the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
The sun plants one lithe foot
On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
Its warm Arabian nights,
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heart-root.

Who shall, of course, be nameless.
Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
As I’m sure you have, too.
Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear unquaried blue

Of those depths is all but blinding.
You may remember that once you brought my boys
Two little woolly birds.
Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
Your thrush among his toys.
And the tides welled about me, and I could find no words.

There is not much else to tell.
One tries one’s best to continue as before,
Doing some little good.
But I would have you know that all is not well
With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.

Anthony Hecht

This is one of the best posts ever!! I have forgotten how much I love poetry, forgotten (with two kids and a full time job) that part of me that *needs* poetry, and am so grateful for this wonderful reminder! (Also – just realized that poems fit perfectly in the little pockets of time I can find for myself during the day and are SO much more meaningful than my usual internet-reading self care ;)

I have now officially spent my entire afternoon reading every single poem mentioned in these comments. I’ve smiled, I’ve cried, and I’ve realized that I like poetry a whole lot more than I realized. Thanks, all, for sharing your favorites with me!

This poem simply gives me joy.
The Long Meadow
Near the end of one of the old poems, the son of righteousness,
the source of virtue and civility
on whose back the kingdom is carried,
passes into the next world.
The wood is dark. The wood is dark,
And on the other side of the wood the sea is shallow, warm, and endless.
In and around it, there is no threat of life–
so little is the atmosphere charged with possibility that
he might as well be wading through a flooded basement.
He wades for what seems like forever,
and never stops to rest in the shade of the metal rain trees
springing out of the water at fixed intervals.
Time, though endless is also short,
so he wades on, until he walks out of the sea and into the mountains,
where he burns on the windward slopes and freezes in the valleys.
After unendurable struggles,
he finally arrives at the celestial realm.
The god waits there for him. The god invites him to enter.
But, looking through the glowing portal,
he sees on that happy plain not those he thinks wait eagerly for him–
his beloved, his brothers, his companions in war and exile,
whose arrogance and viscious indolence
plunged the world into grief.
The god informs him that, yes, those he loved have been carried down
the river of fire. Their thirst for justice
offended the cosmic powers, who are jealous of justice.
In their place in the celestial realm, called Alaukika in the ancient texts,
the breaker of faith is now glorified.
He, at least, acted in keeping with his nature.
Who has not felt a little of the despair the son of righteousness now feels,
staring wildly around him?
The god watches, not without compassion and a certain wonder.
This is the final illusion,
the one to which all the others lead.
He has to pierce through it himself, without divine assistance.
He will take a long time about it,
with only his dog to keep him company,
the mongrel dog, celebrated down the millenia,
who has waded with him,
and never abandoned him to his loneliness.
That dog bears a slight resemblance to my dog,
a skiny, restless, needy, overprotective mutt,
who was rescued from a crack house by Suzanne.
On weekends, and when I can shake free during the week,
I take her to the Long Meadow, in Prospect Park, where dogs
are allowed off the leash in the early morning.
She’s gray-muzzled and old now, but you can’t tell that by the way she runs.
-Vijay Seshadri

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

I LOVE that you posted about poetry! Billy Collins is one of the reasons I did my Master’s in poetry–he inspired me with accessible poetry in college and I couldn’t stop writing. And then, I moved to Scotland to learn about poetry (from his British editor), and met my husband there. So, poetry: thank you! People don’t talk much about poetry, because it’s not a huge emphasis in our ed system, but it’s more important than ever. My favorite poem will always be The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop, because you can just walk along as she watches the scene. It’s transporting and that’s what I try to do with my own poetry these days. Thanks for talking about poetry here!!

Me And My Lass, We Are A Poem by John Rybicki

We tangle our hair in the moon,
then she coughs and I have no net

to catch the cough so I make her hot tea
with honey. I call her my coughing alarm clock,

but she’s warmer and smoother than our oven
for waltzing with.

When we travel in our covered wagon,
she’s in the bathtub splashing her way

across the prairie, singing Bo Diddley songs.
Any drops she spills

the prairie dogs lick them up.
That’s the kind of poem she is.

When we lie down in the earth,
we’ll need coffins with holes bored

through their sides: we’ll each have
one arm hanging out

so I can take hold of her
hand, even while we’re in the dirt.

Some nights our bed floats through
the bedroom wall. We’re on our bellies

laughing and rowing with one arm.
When we get tired, the stars

make nice pillows for our heads.
The wind is what wakes me,

blowing so hard I watch my love’s skin
flake off: a whole storm of her

flutters away from me until all that’s left
inside her is a tired old woman

holding her spine like a candle.

Ness

This is where those who hate monuments
pay last disrespects to the world. They’ve wrecked art,
cities, the language passed woman to man and back.
They’ve destroyed personal records, birth, school, marriage
and divorce. With luck they’ll board a final ship
that flies a flag no colour on earth.
They’ll bribe the captain to destroy the record of death.
For them the horizon is a pass.
Beyond it the glamour and thrill of ignorant waste.

And I’ll be one of them, no shame. I’ll tear every poem
and toss lines in tatters to that great God, wind.
I’ll leave laughing. Everything ends here, life
hope, civilisation, love, loneliness and regret. The end
promised children. The world on medieval maps
that drops off blue for water into white for void.
I’ll give up whatever’s hard, saying the plural of ghost,
the singular of girls.
I’ll shed my life and sail counter to breakers.

The ship will tire far out and lose stroke and start back
in the wash. On my way home I’ll dream it again,
something like history even if wrong, starting with sun
and coming down the ages, unclassified tooth
to computer, star to diamond and back. If you find me
broken and babbling on rock, listen very hard.
The tongue may be dated. If you pick up a phrase
you can match it with words on that scrap of paper.
You found it in Wind. You don’t worship wind anymore.

R. Hugo

I really love this story. It’s great that you got to foster a relationship with some older like that! She’s sounds like she was very wise.

Best,
Libby

The last couple lines of this one get me every time!

The Archipelago of Kisses
by Jeffrey McDaniel

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

I love poems. I love writing them and reading them and working through them. John Updike’s Perfection Wasted is one of my favorites. My mom sent it to me after my grandmother died, with the note “a lovely poem to inspire you”. I think about that poem often, I have a few lines of it tattooed on me. I think anyone who has lost someone would find it deeply relatable.

I found this poem a few months after a friend’s death and it comforts me every time I’ve read it in the years since.

Other Worlds Await You by Omid Safi

Wipe your tears
child
It’s not the end of the world.

It’s the end of a world.

Beyond this world,
many worlds there are

It’s not the end of the world.
It’s the end of the world
you’ve known.

Other worlds await you.

Worlds you’ll inhabit
Worlds you’ll create.

Mourn now,
my child.
Mourn this world
coming to an end.

Grieve the dreams
That will never come to be

Wipe your tears,
child
And dream again.

There are more worlds to come.

After every apocalypse
You will rise again,
my child.

One world ends,
Another begins.

The Jesus of your soul
Now on the cross
Buried under
Will rise again

After this year of sadness
There’ll be an ascension

The joy tomorrow
Is already inside
The grief today

Inna ma’a ‘l-usri yusra
Fa inna ma’a ‘l-usri yusra.

It’s not the end of the world
Many worlds there are
Other worlds
Await
Worlds that you’ll make
With your hands

Dreams of seeds
Watered with the now tears.

https://onbeing.org/blog/other-worlds-await-you/

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore — makes me want to weep.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Days
By Billy Collins

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.