April Rain Song

April Rain Song
by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.



http://allpoetry.com/April-Rain-Song

Pterosaurs

Pterosaurs
TERR-oh-sawrs (winged lizards)

The pterrifying pterosaurs
Flew ptours the ptime of dinosaurs.
With widespread wings and pteeth pto ptear,
The pterrorized the pteeming air.
They were not ptame.
They were ptenacious--
From the Ptriassic
Pto the Cretaceous.


By Douglas Florian

Found here:  http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/2011/04/poetry-in-classroom-diggin-on-dinosaurs.html

From Song of Myself

From Song of Myself

by Walt Whitman

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . . he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds.
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Found here:   http://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_FromSongofMyself.html

Malheur Before Dawn

Malheur Before Dawn
William Stafford

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.
I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears.

Little ones at first, the stars retired, leaving
polished little circles on the sky for awhile.

Then the sun began to shout from below the horizon.
Throngs of birds campaigned, their music a tent of sound.

From across a pond, out of the mist,
one drake made a V and said its name.

Some vast animal of sound began to rouse
from the reeds and lean outward.

Frogs discovered their national anthem again.
I didn’t know a ditch could hold so much joy.

So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world.


http://williamstafford.org/broad/pages/malheur.html

Mist

Mist by Henry David Thoreau

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the dasied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of the lake and seas and rivers,
Bear only purfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men's fields! 


http://www.bartleby.com/248/303.html

Praise Song

Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds; yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though the darkness gathers, praise the crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.



Found on the Writer's Almanac here. 
 

What the Bird Said Early In the Year

What the Bird Said Early In the Year
C.S. Lewis


I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.


Found here. 

The Wild Swans at Coole

The Wild Swans at Coole

W.B. Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,   

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water   

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones   

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me   

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings   

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,   

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,   

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,   

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;   

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,   

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,   

Mysterious, beautiful;   

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day   

To find they have flown away?

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.


Found here. 

Aimless Love

"Aimless Love" by Billy Collins

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor's window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door—
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor—
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.




Found at the Writers Almanac here. 

I go down to the shore

I go down to the shore
Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.


This was printed in Mary Oliver's book A Thousand Mornings. You can hear Krista Tippet recite it in her interview with Mary Oliver here, read it on a billion blogs like this one, or hear John Green recite it on his podcast (at 0:56) here.

Trans-

Rita Dove

I work a lot and live far less than I could,
but the moon is beautiful and there are
blue stars . . . . I live the chaste song of my heart.

—Garcia Lorca to Emilia Llanos Medinor,
November 25, 1920

The moon is in doubt
over whether to be
a man or a woman.

There’ve been rumors,
all manner of allegations,
bold claims and public lies:

He’s belligerent. She’s in a funk.
When he fades, the world teeters.
When she burgeons, crime blossoms.

O how the operatic impulse wavers!
Dip deep, my darling, into the blank pool.

Found on Poetry.org here.

Earth Day

By Jane Yolen

 

 

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

Each blade of grass,

Each honey tree,

Each bit of mud,

And stick and stone

Is blood and muscle,

Skin and bone.

And just as I

Need every bit

Of me to make

My body fit,

So Earth needs

Grass and stone and tree

And things that grow here

Naturally.

That’s why we

Celebrate this day.

That’s why across

The world we say:

As long as life,

As dear, as free,

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me. 

 

Found on Poetry Foundation here. 

God's Garden

by Robert Frost

God made a beateous garden
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said: "To you, my children,
These lovely flowers I give.
Prune ye my vines and fig trees,
With care my flowerets tend,
But keep the pathway open
Your home is at the end."

Then came another master,
Who did not love mankind,
And planted on the pathway
Gold flowers for them to find.
And mankind saw the bright flowers,
That, glitt'ring in the sun,
Quite hid the thorns of av'rice
That poison blood and bone;
And far off many wandered,
And when life's night came on,
They still were seeking gold flowers,
Lost, helpless and alone.


O, cease to heed the glamour
That blinds your foolish eyes,
Look upward to the glitter
Of stars in God's clear skies.
Their ways are pure and harmless
And will not lead astray,
Bid aid your erring footsteps
To keep the narrow way.
And when the sun shines brightly
Tend flowers that God has given
And keep the pathway open
That leads you on to heaven.

In Praise of Fractals

In Praise of Fractals ~ by Emily Grosholz

Variations on the Introduction to
The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot
(New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983)

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
Nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
Puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres,
Nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
Bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
So variously lie about each other
And lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

Compared with Euclid’s elementary forms,
Nature, loosening her hair, exhibits patterns
(Sweetly disarrayed, afloat, uncombed)
Not simply of a higher degree n
But rather of an altogether different
Level of complexity:
The number of the scales of distances
Describing her is almost infinite.

How shall we study the morphology
Of the amorphous? Mandelbrot
Solved the conundrum by inventing fractals,
A lineage of shapes
Fretted by chance, whose regularities
Are all statistical, like Brownian motion,
Whose fine configurations
Turn out to be the same at every scale.

Some fractal sets are curves
(Space-filling curves!) or complex surfaces;
Others are wholly disconnected ‘dusts’;
Others are just too odd to have a name.
Poincar? once observed,
There my be questions that we choose to ask,
But others ask themselves,
Sometimes for centuries, while no one listens.

Questions that ask themselves without repose
May come to rest at last in someone’s mind.
So Mandelbrot in time
Designed his fractal brood to be admired
Not merely for its formal elegance
As mathematical structure,
But power to interpret, curl by curl,
Nature’s coiffure of molecules and mountains.

What gentle revolution of ideas
Disjoins the nineteenth century from ours!
Cantor’s set of nested missing thirds,
Peano’s curve of fractional dimension,
Mandelbrot’s fractals, counter the old rule
Of simple continuity,
Domesticating what short-sightedly
Was once considered monstrous.

Nature embraces monsters as her own,
Encouraging the pensive mathematician
To find anomaly
Inherent in the creatures all around us.
The masters of infinity,
Cantor, Peano, Hausdorff, and Lebesgue,
Discovered sets not in the end transcendent
But immanent, Spinoza’s darling Cause.

Imagination shoots the breeze with Nature,
And what they speak (mathematics) as they flirt
Reveals itself surprisingly effective
In science, a wrought gift
We don’t deserve or seek or understand.
So let us just be grateful,
And hope that it goes on, although our joy
Is always balanced by our bafflement.

This poem makes my heart sing. Read an introduction and get links to her other poems here. 

Swallows

Swallows

by Leonora Speyer

 

They dip their wings in the sunset,
They dash against the air
As if to break themselves upon its stillness:
In every movement, too swift to count,
Is a revelry of indecision,
A furtive delight in trees they do not desire
And in grasses that shall not know their weight.
They hover and lean toward the meadow
With little edged cries;
And then,
As if frightened at the earth’s nearness,
They seek the high austerity of evening sky
And swirl into its depth.


http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/swallows

National Poetry Month 2015!!

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month! So I start us off with my favorite poem for this event... Daffadowndilly  :)


 

Daffadowndilly

by A.A. Milne

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
"Winter is dead."


Found here on All Poetry dot com

Wild Geese

Wild Geese 

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things. http://www.onbeing.org/blog/mary-oliver-reads-wild-geese/5966

Unharvested

Unharvested
by Robert Frost

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.


http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2013/10/poetry-friday-unharvested.html

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.


Found here on Journey with Jesus dot net