Can someone tell me a proper poem not a silly one and the poem has to be by a real writer!?
Answers:
Sappho
Peer of the gods he seems,
Who in thy presence
Sits and hears close to him
Thy silver speech-tones
And lovely laughter.
Ah, but the heart flutters
Under my bosom,
When I behold thee
Even a moment;
Utterance leaves me;
My tongue is useless;
A subtle fire
Runs through my body;
My eyes are sightless,
And my ears ringing;
I flush with fever,
And a strong trembling
Lays hold upon me;
Paler than grass am I,
Half dead for madness.
Yet must I, greatly
Daring, adore thee,
As the adventurous
Sailor makes seaward
For the lost sky-line
And undiscovered
Fabulous islands,
Drawn by the lure of
Beauty and summer
And the sea's secret.
charge of the light brigade by Tennyson
I have lots of poems that I am very proud of- witty, abstract/surreal, fun, serious but I wouldn't put them on the internet before becoming published as they could be stolen.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W.H. Auden
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dead grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
--William Blake
just type "poem" into google or any other search engine. there will be plenty of choices. or try searching for any actual writers you know. e.g. T S Elliot or William Shakespeare
check out Shamus Heaney Irish poet some fab stuff
daffodils by wordsworth
The green eye of the little yellow god, Kipling.
Sick by Shel Silverstein
"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
'I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more-- that's seventeen,
And don't you think that my face looks green?
My leg is cut, my eyes are blue--
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke--
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wreched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb,
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my spine is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say that today is. Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!"
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
try the poems by Charles Bukowsky. smashing stuff.
This poem had a profound influence on me when I first heard it in High School and it still does. Wilfred Owen wrote poetry of the horrors of war. Bear in mind that in the 1st world war kids of 12, 13, 14 were lying about their age and joining up and the recruiting office turned a blind eye to it.
------------------------------.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST By Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
- Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
*"It is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country."
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
The Ancient Mariner by Wordsworth
Lochinvar by Sir Walter Scott
BILLY'S ROSE
by
George R. Sims ( 1847 - 1922 )
Billy's dead and gone to glory - so has Billy's sister Nell:
There's a tale I know about them were I poet I would tell
Soft it comes, with perfume laden like a breath of country air
Wafted down that filthy alley bringing fragrant odors there
In that vile and filthy alley long ago one Winter's day
Dying quick of want and fever ,hapless ,patient Billy lay
while beside him sat his sister, in the garret's dismal gloom
Cheering with her gentle presence Billy's pathway to the tomb
Many a tale of elf and fairy did she tell the dying child
Till his eyes lost half their anguish and his worn, wan features smiled
Tales herself she heard hap-hazard, caught amid the Babel roar
Lisped about by tiny gossips playing round their mother's door
Then she felt his wasted fingers tighten feebly as she told
How beyond this dismal alley lay a land of shining gold,
Where when all the pain was over - when all the tears were shed -
He would be a white frocked angel , with a gold thing on his head.
Then she told some garbled story of a kind-eyed Savior's love
How he built for little children great big playgrounds up above
Where they sang and played at hop-scotch and at horses all the day
And where the beadles or policemen never frightened them away
This was Nell's idea of heaven - just a bit of what she'd heard,
With a little bit invented, with a little bit inferred.
But her brother lay and listened, and he seemed to understand,
For he closed his eyes and murmured he could see the Promised Land
"Yes" he whispered " I can see it sister Nell;
Oh the children look so happy, they are all so strong and well;
I can see them there with Jesus-He is playing with them too!
Let us run away and join them, if there's room for me and you"
She was eight this little maiden, and her life had all been spent
In the garret and the alley where they starved to pay the rent
When a drunken father's curses and a drunken mother's blows
Drove her forth into the gutter from the day's dawn to its close.
But she knew enough, this outcast, just to tell the sinking boy,
"You must die before you are able all these blessings to enjoy.
You must die," she whispered, "Billy I am not even ill;
But I will come to you dear brother, - yes, I promise that I will.
"You are dying, little brother, you are dying ,oh so fast;
I heard father say to mother that he knew you couldn't last
They will put you in a coffin, then you'll wake and be up there
While I am left alone to suffer, in this garret bleak and bare."
"Yes I know it," answered Billy." Ah - sister I do not mind.
Gentle Jesus will not beat me he's not cruel or unkind.
But I can't help thinking, Nelly I should like to take away
Something sister that you gave me I might look at every day
"In the Summer you remember how the mission took us out
To that great green lovely meadow, where we played and ran about
and the van that took us halted by a bright green patch of land,
Where the fine red blossoms grew dear, half as big as mother's hand.
"Nell I asked the good kind teacher what they called such flowers as those
And I remember that he told me that the pretty name was rose
I have never seen them since ,dear- how I wish that I had one
Just to keep and think of you dear, when I am up beyond the sun."
Not a word spoke little Nelly but at night when Billy slept,
On she flung her scanty garments and then down the stairs she crept.
Through the silent streets of London running nimbly as a fawn,
Running on and running ever till the night had changed to dawn.
When the fogy sun had risen, and the mist had cleared away,
All around her, wrapped in snowdrift, there the open country lay
She was tired, her limbs were frozen, and the roads had cut her feet,
But there came no flowery gardens her poor tearful eyes to greet.
She had found the road by asking she had learnt the way to go
She had found the cruel meadow - it was wrapped in cruel snow,
Not a buttercup or daisy not a single verdant blade
Showed its head above its prison. Then she knelt her down and prayed.
With her eyes up cast to heaven, down she sank upon the ground
And she prayed to God to tell her where the roses might be found
Then the cold blast numbed her senses, and her sight grew strangely dim;
And a sudden awful tremor seem to seize her every limb.
"Oh , rose !" she moaned," good Jesus - just a rose to take to Bill !"
And as she prayed a chariot came thundering down the hill.
A lady sat there toying with a red rose rare and sweet;
As she passed she flung it from her, and it fell at Nelly's feet.
Just a word her lord had spoken caused her ladyship to fret
And the rose had been his present, so she flung it in a pet.
But the poor half blinded Nelly thought it had fallen from the skies
And she murmured," Thank you Jesus ! " as she clasped the dainty prize.
Lo that night from out the alley did a child's soul pass away,
From dirt and sin and misery to where God's children play
Lo that night, a wild fierce snowstorm burst in fury o'er the land
And at morn they found Nell frozen, with the red rose in her hand.
Billy's dead and gone to glory - so has Billy's sister Nell;
Am I bold to say this happened in the land where angels dwell :-
That the children met in heaven after all their earthly woes,
And that Nelly kissed her brother and said," Billy , here's your rose"
POETS & POETRY.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
http://education.yahoo.com/homework_help.
http://www.bygosh.com/poems/index.htm.
http://www.poemhunter.com/
http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/com.
http://poetryfoundation.org/
http://www.poetryamerica.com/index.asp.
http://www.netpoets.com/
http://www.poemsforfree.com/index.html.
http://www.poetry.org/
http://www.ilovepoetry.com/
http://www.shabbir.com/romance/romance.h.
http://www.emule.com/poetry/
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels.
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/.
http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/com.
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/index.
http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/al.
http://www.perfectlysaid.com/index.html.
http://www.123lovepoems.com/about_us.php.
http://www.lovepoemsandquotes.com/lovepo.
http://www.101bananas.com/poems/poems.ht.
Good luck.
Kevin, Liverpool, England.
Look up "La palomita" by Rafael Alberti.
A baby sardine
Saw its first submarine
And cried as it looked through the peephole
"Oh come, come, come" said the sardine's mum
"It's only a tin full of people!"
By Spike Milligan
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.
Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
Simon Armitage
Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare (my personal favourite sonnet)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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