Happy World Poetry Day!

Post one of your favourite poems here. One of mine:

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?
BY LINDA PASTAN

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

https://youtu.be/aRULtXn6W0s

Kae Tempest - People’s Faces

Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

don't really do favorites. I've three kids , they each think the other is the favorite,  ..probably cos I don't really like any of them. they killed favorites for me. I used to have so many. but once the second kid popped I knew favorites was gone

..anyhow. I will post this one. was written by a guy Patrick Kavanagh :

On Raglan Road
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay -
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.





this guy made it into a song without changing a word :

https://youtu.be/ZIqr1Ge8Z5w

By :- Ed McCurdy

Last night I had the strangest dream,
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.
I dreamed I saw a mighty room,
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again.

And when the paper was all signed,
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads,
And grateful prayers were made
And the people in the streets below,
Were dancing round and round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground.


I love poetry so much that they are all a favorite. But this resonates and is apt in our world at this time.