Poetry

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

Wikipedia seems to imply he never really settled on any particular religious belief system, experimenting throughout his life. It says he finally decided to go with some obscure offshoot of Judaism shortly before his death, but given his history, who knows whether he would have changed his mind again had he lived longer. This is Wikipedia of course, so take that with a grain of salt, I suppose.

[VCH]

I wander about,

In and out.

Up and down

And all around.

 

I walk in sunshine

I walk in rain,

Over the mountains,

Over the plains.

 

I’ll travel ‘till my day is done

Even in the scorching sun.

For I am a wanderer,

--And I shall wander.

[The Reincarnated Baron von Steuben]

Roses are Red.

Violets are blue.

I look at your posts,

the smell like poo.

 

[Not Directed towards anyone]

[VCH]

Drip, drip

The icicles grow

Like fingers of glass all hung in a row

They shimmer and shine

Like a princess's crown;

Then drip, drip, drip

They all fall down.

[Balladeer]

Mesmerizing, VCH.

[Aran]

Here's one by Alfred Tennyson I just remembered:

 

The Kraken

 

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides: above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumbered and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by men and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

Nice poems, VCH! Nice to see something simple yet beautiful.

 

I have a cousin, who as a child, drip drip drip, they all fell down and cracked his skull. He's alright though. In fact he finished walking home from school that day, not realizing the severity of his wound due to the cold.

[VCH]

Thank You, I appreciate your kind words.

 

They are poems I found among my old school work. I guess at that time they gave us some kind of plan to follow. I have one about Wild horses too, but that's not on me at the moment.

 

btw: Am I the only person that has kept every piece of school work from Kindergarten through university? haha

[Balladeer]

I tend to keep my writing and Spanish stuff but I've tossed more and more each time I go through it. Threw out all my math and spelling last time. Just didn't seem worth keeping around. I foresee eventually the writings will not seem worth it either.

[nikki.]

btw: Am I the only person that has kept every piece of school work from Kindergarten through university? haha

 

I don't even have a copy of papers I've submitted THIS semester. I'll probably download the electronic copies sooner or later, but I'm in no rush.

[nikki.]

So I went ahead and spent a little time on Butterly Caged to try and make the meter more regular:

 

 

Butterfly Caged

 

In the purple hues of twilight

Just outside her window frame

Where she sat and saw the sun set

On the darkened evening grass,

Fell a feather from a sparrow

Through the fading summer light,

Tumbling ‘round with wild abandon

She saw birds across the plains

That edged on the distant fields

That stretched out in all directions

And around her lonely house.

 

Sat below the calming starlight

She leans out her window frame:

Runs her fingers down the cool wood,

Holds her hand into the night.

Stillness moves, the air embraces;

Wraps her fingers with its chill,

Calling softly through her window

Runs its breath throughout her hair,

Past her cheek it slowly drifted,

And around her darkened room,

Then it blew back out the window

Where she sat and watched the night.

 

 

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

I'm not sure what the difference is, Nikki, because I haven't compared it. It's just as good, if not better, however.

 

I've uploaded every poem I've written for public viewing at my Poetry pages on my website. I've highlighted the poems I'm particularly proud of on those pages, although I like almost all of them. There's plenty to read there.

[VCH]

Stars wink and grin.

Some are yellow some are white;

Some are dull and some are bright.

If I were blind would they still shine?

Or would all such beauty be left behind?

 

This doesn't follow any pattern, it's just something I wrote to pass some time. (Although I suppose stars aren't yellow, are they. haha)

 

I suppose this isn't poetry, but what else am I going to do with it?

Don’t quit before you’ve begun,

Because as your life spins,

Sometimes its in the mud, sometimes its in sun.

But the wheel comes around;

So wait for the wheel.

[VCH]

It's OK to take time to decide but take too long and all paths close, more or less. I have a problem with this, sometimes.

 

 

The clouds twist above and the road carries on.

But just up ahead is a fork in your path.

Should you go left

or should you go right?

Some are likely to choose nothing at all,

and just sit in that place,

looking left, looking right

looking up, looking down.

But mostly they just frown, and wait, and wait and wait and wait and wait.

 

Others think themselves Smart, and choose neither, not left not right,

but straight on ahead,

they bash in a squiggling path.

First a bit left then more to the right.

Oops, lookout, one paths near out of sight.

 

And on they will go ‘til the middle path (the Clever path) becomes harder and harder, and finally too hard at all.

The brambles are too thick, the rocks to rocky, the mountains too high.

Finally they decide, like everyone else, should i go left or should i go right?

Except now it’s so late.

Most trains have left stations, most busses have bussed, and they’re left with a road all full of dust.

 

So should you go right, or should you go left?

There’s no EASY answer, except to decide, and stick to that path ... at least for awhile. Don’t worry if it’s dark. don’t worry if it’s scary. don’t worry if it’s filled with monsters so hairy.

 

For a trick i know:

 

if you scramble and crawl and continue on far, what was one path becomes two, three, four, five, six, or maybe even more.

Choose, don’t rush, but also don’t worry.

 

One path leads to another and that to another until finally, when you look back from the high place you’re on, your footprints twirling and twisting make quite a mess across the valley below.

But messes are fun and twisted things interesting.

So look for awhile and see where you’ve been (don’t forget to smile),

then look to the next high place and get on your way:

turning left, turning right; turning in, turning out; going up, going down. Just get on your way.

[Goldengirl]

When I saw this thread had been revived, it was with a small sense of dread realizing I probably posted a sophomoric poem. Looking back, I'm content with the selection I made. Here's another.

 

 

The astronomers were all baffled

When all of a sudden the stars in the sky

Just switched off one by one and for a while

We made a game of it watching them die day by die

As huge swathes of night become empty and we'd try

To guess how much longer the rest would last

Picking our favorite stars and betting against chance

That they would survive this onslaught and for a while

A lone star from the horsehead nebula was the only survivor

And people prayed to it as their god but suddenly it too died

The night sky that we had assumed so constant

Seemed much less so just the planets of our solar system

Wandering around in the darkness wondering

Where their constant companions had gone

The universe seemed a lot more cold and bleak

And there was no question that we were alone

In hushed galaxies and vacuous space

 

The people were understandably miffed

How could this be the case when the stars

Had stood so long as points of continual clarity

Inspiration throughout the generations and guide

To sailors and landlocked dreamers

History teachers pulled their hair out as they tried

To teach countless children what an astrolabe was

When their only conception of astral light was the

Fuzzy representations on television and old tales

Of constellations and how aliens might exist

In what they knew to be an empty black void

Certainly the ET fanatics saw their numbers shrink

Until they too were seen as a peculiar cultural mania

Along with the strange obsession that writers had

With those lights that were once in the night

Starless students peered at literature and wondered

Why the authors couldn't be inspired by a lantern

After all that was just burning gas as well

Don't even get them started on Star Trek

 

But poetry is so much than stars and my book

Is written on the palette and I write with broad strokes

Taking the objects and the locations and the faces

And painting emotions and stories with them

It's true that the stars have given me words

As I've tried to rearrange constellations on the Milky Way

And write words with the nuclear fusion and red dwarfs

My poetry is in your smile and the little razors

Both seem so big and so too are the moments I chose to

Immortalize in color collages mixing pigments

Even without the stars and their brightness

I can express myself with boulders and hairs

So what if the stars are now just imprints in Hollywood

Symbols printed on flags and soon they may be

Replaced with circles or pictures of the sun

I've still seen more shooting stars than I ever thought

That I would and when the last star the Sun

Blinks out I'll be happy to rest just like the rest

Of the stars with their plasma faded into chilled vapor