Peaty Poetry

[Vileplume]

Please post any poetry, short stories, or literature that you enjoy and consider "Peaty" for any reason. While reading the below Sara Teasdale poem, I couldn't help but think of obvious connections to our current technological, political, and even more, existential state.

There Will Come Soft Rains (1920)
by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

 

[JamesGatz]

Ozymandias - Percy Shelley (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—

“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

[LUH 3417]

Today​

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
—Frank O’Hara

 

[Vileplume]

Ozymandias - Percy Shelley (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—

“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I can see how this poem connects to the bottom part of your signature. After a life spent chasing power, ornamental items, a capitalist slave workforce, you die. Then what do you have? Desert.

 

[Vileplume]

Today​

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
—Frank O’Hara

Beautiful poem. Thanks for sharing it. It makes me imagine how it must have felt to be a kid at a diner or soda fountain in the 1950s. Playing baseball in the street, then going to get some ice cream, going home to read a comic book and listen to the radio. Eat a steak with some potatoes, drink some milk. Life.

 

[Peatness]

Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

 

[Vileplume]

Not poetry, but a collection of timely and relevant quotations from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
--John the Savage

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
--John the Savage

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”
--John the Savage

"One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr Watson—paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”
--Mustapha Mond, World Controller

"Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”
--Mustapha Mond, World Controller

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
--Mustapha Mond, World Controller

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
--Mustapha Mond, World Controller

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
--Mustapha Mond, World Controller

 

[Peatness]

Love after Love By Derek Walcott​

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

[Peatness]

Interlude for Poetry - 1 | Ramola D | from Invisible Season​

View: https://www.bitchute.com/video/p8yWRF6hFWCQ/

 

[Lilac]

"The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." --Wallace Stevens

 

[Peatness]

It's national poetry day today and the theme this year is the environment. But I don't care for that topic right now so here is a poem that moved me when I first read it

The God Who Loves You by Carl Dennis | Poetry Foundation

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

www.poetryfoundation.org