What's your favorite poem (20 lines or less)? Please post it so that all may enjoy. I'll go first:

 

The Clod and the Pebble  (William Blake)

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these meters meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."

 

 

Great stuff by Blake! He wrote so many masterpieces that it's hard to choose just one. Pretty much any poem from the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience would qualify, IMHO. Looking forward to hearing all of your favorites...

RUBBISH POEM!

Ah, the wisdom of a 15-year-old!  

Very nice poem by Poe.

Remorse For Any Death
Jorge Luis Borges

Free of memory and of hope, 
limitless, abstract, almost future, 
the dead man is not a dead man: he is death. 
Like the God of the mystics, 
of Whom anything that could be said must be denied,
the dead one, alien everywhere,
is but the ruin and absence of the world. 
We rob him of everything, 
we leave him not so much as a color or syllable: 
here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see, 
there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait.
Even what we are thinking,
he could be thinking;

we have divvied up like thieves
the booty of nights and days.

This one's called "Squelch!"

I am a dainty Brontosaurus

Skipping through a meadow

Oops a daisy, pardon me

Must watch where I tread-o

(silly place to have a picnic anyway)

From the Sentimental Bloke, by the turn-of-the-last-century Australian bush poet, C.J. Dennis: 

"Yeh live, yeh love, yeh learn

To square the ledger in some thortful hour

The everlastin' answer to the sun

Must allus be, 'Where's the sense in getting sour?...

Livin' and lovin' - so life mooches on."

Said an optometrist with a wry cackle:

"I had such a dismal debacle.

"I could not have been blinder,

"fell in my lens grinder

"and made of myself a spectacle."

Who you talking to?

Himself.   

fischer wrote: Himself.   

---

Good call! Hi-5!!

Good call farma Joe hyuck hyuck hycuk

Do you believe in always,the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe,the rain answered

 I love E E Cummings.

 

n OthI n  g can  s urPas s  the m  y SteR y  of  s tilLnes s  	-- e. e. cummings

It's lovely, fischer

Wang Lun's Farewell

Li Bai prepared to sail away,

When from the bank he heard a song.

Peach Blossom Lake's water is deep,

But not as deep as Wang Lun's heart. 

amntony wrote:It's lovely, fischer 

---

What is lovely, and what are you talking about?

Clam's Dignity

(sir aylon ortsacpan)

 

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Percy Shelley's Ozymandias:

 I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Something there is in beauty

which grows in the soul of the beholder

like a flower:

fragile--

for many are the blights

which may waste

the beauty

or the beholder--

and imperishable---

for the beauty may die,

or the beholder may die,

or the world may die, 

but the soul in which the flower grows survives.

 

 

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which you

 were probably

saving for breakfast

Forgive me 

they were delicious

so sweet and so cold

--- William Carlos Williams

I'm a fan of Williams