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!  

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow- You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep! O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream? Edgar Allan Poe I'm not really a fan of Poe's but I really like the line "what we see and what we seem are but a dream". A nice idea and one I think is still relevant today. Blake is great though and if one of his had'nt been submitted I proberbly would have.

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.   

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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. 

This is the death of the neurotic lover, entangled and strangled in this living room couch trip romance. Separated by walls and ceilings and brick and mortar, always down the stairs, avoiding stares, twisting arms and limbs until they've broken from bending backwards. The desperate, persperated wet nightmare calling card waiting in the mailbox like half-flushed public restroom condoms. Everything becomes something and eventually becomes nothing until it's dissolved and dispersed into the air, breathed in through strangers' lungs in smoky hotel fumes, absorbed in the soil, and resurfaced in the hungry ants that tickle the young couple's legs carelessly straddled under the withering elm. The feeling travels upwards through the power lines, across the setting sky, and back into our very homes where it's televised on the evening news just before the big game. My hopes and dreams were broadcast to me late at night on a television infomercial advertising the soundtrack to my life. And when the spokesman's hungry eyes flickered neon jackpots I knew that I was really just one giant half-hour comedy where the show has ended but the laugh track keeps on playing.

Tomorrow is an atom bomb and yesterday is a bicycle built for two. Now is temporary, never quite here, like I'm always just missing it as it staggers out of sight, always glimpsing it from the corner of my eye but when I look it's gone, nothing more than trails of smoke and old candy wrappers, a wino puking in an alley, only lifting his head up in just enough time to ask for a dime, just a dime. And maybe that's all it ever was. Air is stale and breathing it in causes cancer. Everything causes cancer now. Bombarded by cellular phones and power lines and toxic chemicals, it's no wonder I'm rotting from the inside, no wonder why my head is just another place to keep old and useless thoughts, like some kind of invalid's diary. We move through life like a car-wreck, rubber-necking to catch a glimpse of the carnage. Maybe we're lucky and there's a decapitation. More often than not, though, it's just a fender bender, some idiot who wasn't paying attention and ran a red light. Seeing the world through cardboard eyes, trying to comprehend a three-dimensional reality but we are flat, not even two-dimensional, just scratchings on a piece of paper, and it's an impossible victory, like playing Russian Roulette with a full chamber. There are miracles all around, salvation in the hum of a refrigerator, redemption in the arms of a good sofa, religion in a cereal box- a new testament waiting to be reborn in the cluttered living rooms and dens of suburban America. But like the present, it is hidden. The grass keeps growing, even as we cut it. One must wipe the blades after mowing or they will rust. They will rust! And always bag the clippings. Remember, the brown bags are for organics, the white and black for trash, the blue bins for newspapers, the yellow for bottles, the orange for old love letters, the red for aborted fetuses, the clear for leftover dreams discarded like useless hunks of meat even the dog wouldn't eat. And somewhere in there is life, which can't be recylced or thrown away, just bottled and put on a shelf, out of sight where the neighbors' kids won't find it. The past is a dream. The future doesn't exist. The present is tense. Present-tense. Right back to the beginning, to the elusive moment, the here and now which is already fleeting, running on all fours into the empty darkness of the past.

amntony wrote:It's lovely, fischer 

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What is lovely, and what are you talking about?

yes 006, that was a great album called A secret Wish was'nt it? The poem is also used in part at the beginning of a great film called Picnic at hanging rock