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ARS POETICA

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ARS POETICA is a group for those who love poetry, anyone who is just curious, and everyone in between. Post your favorite or original poems.

Members: 100
Latest Activity: May 18

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Featured Poem

Severed Selves

Two separate divided silences,
Which, brought together, would find loving voice;
Two glances which together would rejoice
In love, now lost like stars beyond dark trees;
Two hands apart whose touch alone gives ease;
Two bosoms which, heart-shrined with mutual flame,
Would, meeting in one clasp, be made the same;
Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas:--

Such are we now. Ah! may our hope forecast
Indeed one hour again, when on this stream
Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?
An hour how slow to come, how quickly past,
Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last,
Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream.

-- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Comment by Dallas the Phallus on September 7, 2009 at 2:57pm: I seem to recall a poem I read once as a teen called "The extraordinary sleepiness of hair," but I cannot remember the author, and a search online comes up with nothing. Does this poem sound familiar to anyone?

Comment by Jaume on September 5, 2009 at 9:13am: Feeling creative? Join the limerick contest!

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on August 30, 2009 at 5:34pm: Ajita, thanks for posting the poem. I have not heard of Sarah Lindsey. I read it, but her style is not really my thing.

Comment by Ajita Kamal on August 24, 2009 at 7:08pm: Have any of you heard of Sarah Lindsey? Here's one by her:

Underground Orchids

by

Sarah Lindsay

Life on this planet persists in knitting its minerals
into animal and vegetable variations, behaving
at all times like the central point of the cosmos,
and because it is water it seeks the paths of least resistance
and pauses sometimes to admire itself,
because it is earth it may subside in camouflage
or darkness or cease to move for its own good reasons,
because it is air it might seem like nothing
yet be the invisible sustenance of oceans or forests or a shade of blue,
and because it is fire it leaps and is uncertain
and leaves smelly waste and goes everywhere it can uninvited.
It presses its lips where boiling sulfur cracks the ocean floor,
swims in acid cavities below the roots of mountains,
burrows and flits and infects and strangles and hatches,
constructs mats, reefs, trunks, tunnels, stained-glass windows
and ad campaigns for raspberry-scented chinchilla dust.
Mammalian bipeds especially intrude where they are unfit to go,
chewing coca leaves to walk on ridges where oxygen falls away,
training beasts to carry weight in the desert and drinking their blood,
beating sea water back with little hands.
On the southern ice cap, one turns his frozen socks inside out
and shakes his blackened toes into his lap.
In the country he comes from, earth is parched,
air warped with the heat he longs for.
Thirsty flies glue themselves to plants that begin to digest them;
modest orchids bloom underground. In his country
glinting saucers are filling with penicillin
while soldiers don uniforms. There is singing.
A shimmer over cannon mouths. Fire consumes. Mud consumes.
Many stars since they were born
have been sending their light to shine upon us,
but some are rushing away as fast as they can.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on August 5, 2009 at 12:53pm: @Niki: Not bad, but I can't say she's my favorite. Perhaps if I read more.

BTW, don't hesitate to post those in the discussion forum. Thanks.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on July 26, 2009 at 6:29pm: Very nice Judith. Nice pacing and tone of voice.

Comment by Ian Mason on May 16, 2009 at 2:22am: "How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past" What a great line! Good poem. Thanks.

Comment by Brad on May 15, 2009 at 12:35pm: Yes, Shakespeare is one that I like to ponder on now and then. I'll have to read that today, as it is a cloudy, drizzley day here. A good back drop for a little Shakespeare, Poe, Auden...

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on May 15, 2009 at 12:23pm: @lstpuzzlepc: Yes, it is a beautiful poem. Byron is not my favorite, but I liked that one in particular. You may also like Shakespeare's "Sonnet 30":

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Shakespeare often seemed concern with aging, the passage of time, and loss.