Community Chat

[itiswhatitis]

I love poetry and prose......

I didn't know it was world poetry day.  Furthermore, I didn't know such a day has been set aside for this since 1999.

In November 1999, UNESCO designated World Poetry Day to be held on March 21 each year.  The organization recognized the important role of poetry in the arts and in cultures throughout the world and over time. It also wanted the day to promote the efforts of small publishers with regard to publishing poetry. The day also focused on promoting a return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, as well as strengthening the association between poetry and other forms of expression, such as dance, music, and painting. The first World Poetry Day was held on March 21, 2000.

One of my favorite poems is as follows:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

[Annabellethecat66]

One of my favorite poems USED to be 'Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening....(as follows)...until my English Professor taught me what it supposedly was about!

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer 5
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake. 10
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, 15
And miles to go before I sleep.

I forgot to say I memorized it long ago in high school.

[itiswhatitis]

@Annabellethecat66, this is a beautiful poem by Robert Frost!

[Perkup]

---

@Annabellethecat66 wrote:

One of my favorite poems USED to be 'Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening....(as follows)...until my English Professor taught me what it supposedly was about!

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer 5
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake. 10
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, 15
And miles to go before I sleep.

I forgot to say I memorized it long ago in high school.

---

Obviously, and thankfully, I didn't have your English Professor. Anyone can make anything their mind conjurs up out of anything.This is one of my favorite poems, thanks to a wonderful high school English teacher, who was a friend of Robert Frost. She had letters from him.  Why do people tend to make something less clean out of everything? I accept the poem as exactly what it appears to be. Thanks Mr. Frost.

[Citrine1]

My favorite ......

The birds, they sang at the break of day

Start again I heard them say

Don't dwell on what has passed away

Or what is yet to be

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

[Oznell]

Letter in November

Love, the world

Suddenly turns, turns color.  The streetlight

Splits through the rat's-tail

Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic,

This little black

Circle, with its tawn silk grasses-- babies' hair

There is a green in the air,

Soft, delectable.

It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

i think I may be enormous,

I am so stupidly happy,

My wellingtons

Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.

Two times a day

I pace it, sniffing

The barbarous holly with its viridian

Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpses.

I love them.

I love them like history.

The apples are golden,

Imagine it----

My seventy trees

Holding their gold-ruddy balls

In a thick gray death-soup,

Their million

Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.

Nobody but me

Walks the waist-high wet.

The irreplaceable

Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

I am so enjoying this thread, itiswhatitis!   The above is one of the more well-known poems of Sylvia Plath, written about a year I think before she famously committed suicide.  The imagery is so beautiful as it careens between a kind of euphoria and sadness, which I would guess has to do with the breaking up of her marriage to Ted Hughes.  As an American living in England, she did love their house deep in the Devon countryside, as she vividly describes in the poem...

[CLEM]

Oh poetry!  I don't understand it at all when I read it; however if someone with the right voice recites some of it, I actually love it.

Does anybody remember back in the late sixties/early seventies when people had poetry  evenings in their own homes and people came and everyone read their own poetry? 

[feline groovy]

@Annabellethecat66

This one also:

[twinny70]

My favorite poem is "Footprints In the Sand."

[itiswhatitis]

I Choose The Mountain

The low lands call
I am tempted to answer
They are offering me a free dwelling
Without having to conquer

The massive mountain makes its move
Beckoning me to ascend
A much more difficult path
To get up the slippery bend

I cannot choose both
I have a choice to make
I must be wise
This will determine my fate

I choose, I choose the mountain
With all its stress and strain
Because only by climbing
Can I rise above the plain

I choose the mountain
And I will never stop climbing
I choose the mountain
And I shall forever be ascending

I choose the mountain

Howard Simon