Excerpts from some favourites-

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
The road not taken by Robert Frost


" In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I was reading a book of poetry just last night! Great new thread! This has to be my all time favorite poem... it is the true, honest, complete definition of love... what it can be, what it should be, what it is made to be. I'll add more poems later - but this one is my favorite.

"Love"

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I Love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.

You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.


© Roy Croft (1907 - 1973).

That was beautiful HC.

Thank you for sharing.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an al time favourite of mine.


The very deep did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.


Pure genius.

"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."

I always remember this bit of the poem,Temp.


Here is another poem I like-
WHAT A LITTLE GIRL HAD ON HER MIND

What a little girl had on her mind was:
Why do the shoulders of other men's wives
Give off so strong a smell like magnolia;
Or like gardenias?
What is it,
That faint veil of mist,
Over the shoulders of other men's wives?
She wanted to have one,
That wonderful thing
Even the prettiest virgin cannot have.

The little girl grew up.
She became a wife and then a mother.
One day she suddenly realized;
The tenderness
That gathers over the shoulders of wives,
Is only fatigue
From loving others day after day.

IBARAGI NORIKO (b. 1926)(Japanese poet)

VIXEN (http://www.damonart.com/myth_vixen.html)

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
High note held without trembling without voice without sound
Aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
Of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
Never caught in words warden of where the river went
Touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
Window onto the hidden place and the other time
At the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
In the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
You no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
You are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
Even now you are unharmed even now perfect
As you have always been now when your light paws are running on
The breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
When I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer when
I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
From the creeds of difference and contradictions
That were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
As long as it lasted until something that we were
Had ended when you are no longer anything
Let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
And before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
Guttering on a screen let my words find their own
Places in the silence after the animals

-- W.S. Merwin

This is one of my favorites...

"Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning"


There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
Restaurants fall into dreams
With candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
In a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
Idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
Lovers are listening
For the master to tell them they are one
With the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
On the freeway tonight
As a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
Sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
And sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
Sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
Keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
Ans bass players float away on their instruments
Clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
Buried masts of Amsterdam arise
As the great wave sweeps on Eastward
To wash away over-age Camembert Europe
Manhatta steaming in sea-vines
The washed land awakes again to wilderness
The only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
A cry of seabirds high over
In empty eternity
As the Hudson retakes its thickets
And Indians reclaim their canoes

~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sad as hell, but fabulous:

Protocols

We went there on the train. They had big barges that they towed.
We stood up, there were so many I was squashed.
There was a smoke-stack, then they made me wash.
It was a factory, I think. My mother held me up
And I could see the ship that made the smoke.

When I was tired my mother carried me.
She said, "Don't be afraid." But I was only tired.
Where we went there is no more .Odessa.
They had water in a pipe--like rain, but hot;
The water there is deeper than the world

And I was tired and fell in in my sleep
And the water drank me. That is what I think.
And I said to my mother, "Now I'm washed and dried.”
My mother hugged me and it smelled like hay
And that is how you die. And that is how you die.

--Randall Jarrell

There's another one I have in a book that I'm too lazy to go get right now. It's the dedication of the book to the poet's wife - it's lovely. Maybe I'll be less lazy tomorrow! :)

Less lazy today! :)

A Grace

I give thanks for the way our kitchen dance
Takes on the familiarity of ritual,
From the moment of decision, reached
In a mixture of eagerness and relief -
You'll roast a chicken, maybe, or
Walk us both toward boeuf carbonnade -
Through the several sub-tasks
We can or cannot help each other do,
And we quiet down, hearing small
Sounds of lettuce being torn,
Prunes snipped in quarters,
The nearly silent bristles
Of the mushroom brush -
And then the table set and served,
The centering on a moment of hope
And gratitude, as once again
We face each other, having done
A small and daily kind of work
In a large, eternal kind of joy.

- Henry Taylor

I got to meet him, he signed my book! :)

One of mine is --

To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Thank you for sharing your favourites.

What a collection we are going to have right here on the Desk!

So many different poems and all of them have something special in them.

Can we explicate them later?? Huh?? Huh?? Please??

Wondergirl,
That is a wonderful idea...

Written in the early 1970s which is why Kinnell refers to 2009 as being in the far future. :) From The Book Of Nightmares... highly recommended if you care about poetry.
-----

Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight
Galway Kinnell

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
Into your room, and pick you up,
And hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
Hard,
As if clinging could save us. I think
You think
I will never die, I think I exude
To you the permanence of smoke or stars,
Even as
My broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
The sun, don't go down, I have stood by
As you told the flower, don't grow old,
Don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,

Until washerwomen
Feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
And hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
And rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
And iron twists weapons toward the true north,
And grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
And men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
And lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
Dark, O corpse-to-be...

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
This the nightmare you wake screaming from:
Being forever
In the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone
Quietly eating, you clambered up
On my lap: to all
The mouthfuls rising toward
All the mouths, at the top of your voice
You cried
Your one word, caca! Caca! Caca!
And each spoonful
Stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
Steam.

Yes,
You cling because
I, like you, only sooner
Than you, will go down
The path of vanished alphabets,
The roadlessness
To the other side of the darkness,

Your arms
Like the shoes left behind,
Like the adjectives in the halting speech
Of old men,
Which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,
Some impossible Tuesday
In the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
Among the black stones
Of the field, in the rain,

And the stones saying
Over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,

And the raindrops
Hitting you on the fontanel
Over and over, and you standing there
Unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
You find yourself with someone you love
In a café at one end
Of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
Where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

And if you commit then, as we did, the error
Of thinking,
One day all this will only be memory,

Learn,
As you stand
At this end of the bridge which arcs,
From love, you think, into enduring love,
Learn to reach deeper
Into the sorrows
To come – to touch
The almost imaginary bones
Under the face, to hear under the laughter
The wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
The mouth
Which tells you, here,
Here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon
Sends back, I can see in your eyes

The hand that waved once
In my father's eyes, a tiny kite
Wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

And the angel
Of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
In sleep. Already
In your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
When I come back
We will go out together,
We will walk out together among
The ten thousand things,
Each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
Of dying is love.

Thank you all for your contributions...
Hope to see more:).

i love this poem, it's by silvya plath, it might seem twisted, but if you get the tone and read it carefully, you might get a good laugh from it. i suggest you read her novel THE BELL JAR, i read it this past summer and loved it. it's somewhat autobiographical.

Cut

What a thrill -
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they one?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

A copy of this hangs in my dining room. This poem speaks to me like nothing else I have ever read. To me every word is simply perfection.


Max Ehrmann


Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
And remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
Be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
And listen to others,
Even the dull and the ignorant;
They too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
They are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
You may become vain and bitter;
For always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.


Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
It is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
For the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
Many persons strive for high ideals;
And everywhere life is full of heroism.


Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
For in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
It is as perennial as the grass.


Take kindly the counsel of the years,
Gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
Be gentle with yourself.


You are a child of the universe,
No less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here.
And whether it is clear to you,
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.


Therefore be at peace with God,
Whatever you conceive Him to be,
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
In the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.


With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
It is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.


Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952

G,
Those were truly inspiring and true words.
Thank you for sharing.

The sky is deep, the sky is dark,
The light of stars is so damn stark.
When I look up, I fill with fear.
If all we have is what lies here,
This lonely world, this troubled place,
Then cold dead stars and empty space...
Well, I see no reason to persevere,
No reason to laugh or shed a tear,
No reason to sleep or ever to wake,
No promises to keep, and none to make.
And so at night I still raise my eyes
To study the clear but mysterious skies--
That arch above us, as cold as stone.
Are you there, God? Are we alone?

Dean Koontz

Clenched Soul
Pablo Neruda

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
While the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
The fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
Burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
In that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
When I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
And my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
Toward the twilight erasing statues.


Yes, Yes
Charles Bukowski


When God created love he didn't help most
When God created dogs He didn't help dogs
When God created plants that was average
When God created hate we had a standard utility
When God created me He created me
When God created the monkey He was asleep
When He created the giraffe He was drunk
When He created narcotics He was high
And when He created suicide He was low

When He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
And He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
But when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter


While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

-- by Rihaku / Ezra Pound



A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING MOURNING
By John Donne


AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.




The Windhover

To Christ our Lord


I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king-
Dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)



One of my favorite poems is "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," which can also be found in an audio version as read by Ezra Pound himself. I decided not to post it because it's quite long. Look for it if you're interested! Pound's reading is unforgettable.

The following is an excerpt of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" by Ezra Pound
Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More - Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [excerpt] (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15422)

Here is a fantastic recording of Gerald Stern reading "Sylvia"
Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More - Sylvia (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15438)

This lady has a wonderful message.

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
By Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a model's fashion size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies.
I say
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my steps
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please
And to a man
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees
Then they swarm around me
A hive of honey bees.
I say
It's the fire in my eyes
And the flash of my teeth
The swing of my waist
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say
It's in the arch of my back
The sun of my smile
The ride of my breasts
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say
It's in the click of my heels
The bend of my hair
The palm of my hand
The need for my care.
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
~William Blake

This one's not necessarily a poem, but lyrics. It's by Loreena McKennitt called Dante's Prayer:

When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone

I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in the light of the stars

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and the fire

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars

Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We'll rise above these earthly cares

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Please remember me
I always just thought it was truly beautiful

Another favorite is The Highway Man by Alfred Noyes:


THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.


He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.


Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,


And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—


"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."


He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair I' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.


He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching—
Marching—marching—
King George's men came matching, up to the old inn-door.


They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.


They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now, keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say—
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!


She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!


The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain .


Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still!


Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.


He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.


Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs I' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

* * * * * *


And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.


Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

THOU...
I look into thy eyes almighty and the earth
My idol! I chant thy name every breath
When the wind blows I feel the touch
Of your maiden flesh, lying on my couch
As each blow of air comes from thy side
And slips to my way after brimming pride
‘Can I live sans thou?’ is not a question
All know how a fish dwells sans water
The hollow is mind but the heart is replete
With a wish to win sans whom I am effete
When the sun burns I too do the same
Difference? I become in night too a flame

Hi firmbeliever,

Pl tell how u find my this own composition?

And, how is this poem

THY EYES
If I could write the poetry of they eyes!
Where gods dwell and the grace lies
Where arrows come from to kill my being
Where the beauty is for ever never fleeing
The eternal flame in this twain is never dimmed
Even if fall on temples thy tresses untrimmed
The light is there of hope and more
The unravish'd beauty in them is a folklore
The music of thy beauty must go on
For the connoisseurs to relish whenever alone
As the Beethovan is not here for ever
And the Mona Lisa in thy eyes gives a shiver
When Michaelanglo in God gave thou a finish
Must have thought not to part with this
May I dare have a glance at you once more
The company of thy eyes is my wish's core

My POEMS

My poems will remain for time to come
I may die but these will become
My voice for those who love life
Who want to win peace and rid the strife
None of these is writ by me, dear
Someone whispered into my ear
The verses that ye read as my composing
Who? I don't know, just went on jotting
All that He spake for me for I wrote
Learn them by heart or by rote
As they are true to me and the laity
They are everything but coax or gaity
They are filled with me head and tail
Of earth and heavens where gods trail
Can you tell me how should I write
To delight you all sans any spite
So I end the lyric but not end up
As the life is to go on and forever up

(This is also one of my favourite and self-composed poems. How is it? React!)

Please tell if any of the poems written by me has literary qualities, or NOT?