Poetry Archives - Mihaela Limberea

Jabberwocky

18th February 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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This is post 64 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898) was an English author, poet, and mathematician.

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses the poem in his podcast A Mouthful of Air, a podcast of classic and contemporary poetry. Podcast transcription is available.

To read more poems, click here.

Things Said When He Was Gone

11th February 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Blanche Taylor Dickinson

This is post 63 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

My branch of thoughts is frail tonight
As one lone-wind-whipped weed.
Little I care if a rain drop laughs
Or cries; I cannot heed

Such trifles now as a twinkling star,
Or catch a night-bird’s tune.
My whole life is you, to-night,
And you, a cool distant moon.

With a few soft words to nurture my heart
And brighter beams following love’s cool shower
Who knows but this frail wind-whipped weed
Might bear you a gorgeous flower!

Blanche Taylor Dickinson (1896 – 1972) was an American writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance arts movement.

To read more poems, click here.

My Heart Has Known Its Winter

4th February 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Arna Bontemps

This is post 62 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

A little while spring will claim its own,
In all the land around for mile on mile
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone.
My still heart will sing a little while.

And men will never think this wilderness
Was barren once when grass is over all,
Hearing laughter they may never guess
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

Arna Bontemps (1902 – 1973) was an American poet and novelist, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.

To read more poems, click here.

Winter Night

28th January 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Amos Wilder

This is post 61 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

O magical the winter night! Illusory this stretch
Of unimaginable grays; so shadowy a sketch
Only the fading inks of spirit artistry can etch.

Here is nor dawn nor eventide nor any light we know,
This ghostly incandescence and unearthly afterglow,
This far-spread conflagration of the fields of snow

That pales the clouds, snow-laden, and blanches all the night,
As though in place of moon and stars some spectral satellite
Cast glamor on the earth and floods of violet light.

The wraith-like landscape glimmers, valley, lake and hill,
Unutterably patient! Intolerably still!
No inclination of a leaf nor songster’s trill.

. . . So could one stand an hour, a day, a century,
Breathless . . . What frozen silence! What immobility!
As of some gray unfinished world in age-long reverie.

O whither have you vanished, treading the leaves of fall,
Bright spirit of the summer, leaving the scene in thrall
To silence? To what springtime, far, far beyond recall?

What far retreat of being, what ebbing of the flood
Of life to bless far landscapes anew with leaf and bud
Has left prospect passionless and charmed this stricken wood?

. . . And yet from depths how distant, that tide of green shall rise,
And that bright spirit come again with April in her eyes,
And winter’s pale prostrations be but phantom memories.

Amos Wilder (1895 – May 1993) was an American poet, minister, and theology professor.

To read more poems, click here.

January

14th January 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Robert Bridges

This is post 60 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Cold is the winter day, misty and dark:
The sunless sky with faded gleams is rent:
And patches of thin snow outlying, mark
The landscape with a drear disfigurement.

The trees their mournful branches lift aloft:
The oak with knotty twigs is full of trust,
With bud-thronged bough the cherry in the croft;
The chestnut holds her gluey knops upthrust.

No birds sing, but the starling chaps his bill
And chatters mockingly; the newborn lambs
Within their strawbuilt fold beneath the hill
Answer with plaintive cry their bleating dams.

Their voices melt in welcome dreams of spring,
Green grass and leafy trees and sunny skies:
My fancy decks the woods, the thrushes sing,
Meadows are gay, bees hum and scents arise.

And God the Maker doth my heart grow bold
To praise wintry works not understood,
Who all the worlds and ages doth behold,
Evil and good as one, and all as good.

Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930) was a British poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930.

To read more poems, click here.

The City Lights

7th January 2025 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Lucy Larcom

This is post 59 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

New York City at Sunset — *Photo by Muzammil Soorma on Unsplash edited by me*

Underneath the stars the houses are awake;
Upward comes no sound my silent watch to break.
Night has hid the street, with all its motley sights;
Miles around, afar, shine out the city lights:

Stars that softly glimmer in a lower sky,
Dearer than, the glories unexplored on high;
Home-stars, that, like eyes, are glistening through the dark,
With a human tremor wavers every spark.

Glittering lamps above and twinkling lamps below;
The remote, strange splendor, the familiar glow:
One Eye, looking downward from creation’s dome,
Sees in both, his children’s window-lights of home.

Who have dwellings there, in avenues of space?
Whose clear torches kindle through the vague sky-place?
Are they holding tapers, us, astray, to guide,
spirit-pioneers, who lately left our side?

Never drops an answer from those worlds unknown:
Yet no ray is shining for itself alone.
Hints of heaven gleam upward, through our earthly nights;
Tremulous with pathos are the city lights:—

Tremulous with pathos of a half-told tale:
Through therein hope flickers, burning low and pale,
It shall win completeness perfect as the sun:
Broken rays shall mingle, earth and heaven be one.

Lucy Larcom (1824 – 1893) was an American teacher, poet, and author.

To read more poems, click here.

Journey of the Magi

23rd December 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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T. S. Eliot

This is post 58 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) was one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry and the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

To read more poems, click here.

Nightfall in the Tropics

10th December 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Rubén Darío

This is post 57 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

There is twilight grey and gloomy
    Where the sea its velvet trails;
Out across the heavens roomy
    Draw the veils.

Bitter and sonorous rises
    The complaint from out the deeps,
And the wave the wind surprises
    Weeps.

Viols there amid the gloaming
    Hail the sun that dies,
And the white spray in its foaming
    “Miserere” sighs.

Harmony the heavens embraces,
    And the breeze is lifting free
To the chanting of the races
    Of the sea.

Clarions of horizons calling
    Strike a symphony most rare,
As if mountain voices calling
    Vibrate there.

As though dread, unseen, were walking,
    As though awesome echoes bore
On the distant breeze’s quaking
    The lion’s roar.

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Walsh

Rubén Darío (1867—1916) was an influential Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat who initiated the Spanish-language literary movement known as modernismo(modernism).

To read more poems, click here.

The Spirit of Poetry

19th November 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is post 56 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

There is a quiet spirit in these woods,
That dwells where’er the gentle southwind blows;
Where, underneath the white-thorn, in the glade,
The wild flowers bloom, or, kissing the soft air,
The leaves above their sunny palms outspread.
With what a tender and impassioned voice
It fills the nice and delicate ear of thought,
When the fast ushering star of morning comes
O’er-riding the gray hills with golden scarf;
Or when the cowled and dusky-sandaled Eve
In mourning weeds, from out the western gate,
Departs with silent pace! That spirit moves
In the green valley, where the silver brook,
From its full laver, pours the white cascade;
And, babbling low amid the tangled woods,
Slips down through moss-grown stones with endless laughter.
And frequent, on the everlasting hills,
Its feet go forth, when it doth wrap itself
In all the dark embroidery of the storm,
And shouts the stern, strong wind. And here, amid
The silent majesty of these deep woods,
Its presence shall uplift thy thoughts from earth,
As to the sunshine and the pure, bright air
Their tops the green trees lift. Hence gifted bards
Have ever loved the calm and quiet shades.
For them there was an eloquent voice in all
The sylvan pomp of woods, the golden sun,
The flowers, the leaves, the river on its way,
Blue skies, and silver clouds, and gentle winds,
The swelling upland, where the sidelong sun
Aslant the wooded slope, at evening, goes,
Groves, through whose broken roof the sky looks in,
Mountain, and shattered cliff, and sunnyvale,
The distant lake, fountains, and mighty trees,
In many a lazy syllable, repeating
Their old poetic legends to the wind.
And this is the sweet spirit, that doth fill
The world; and, in these wayward days of youth,
My busy fancy oft embodies it,
As a bright image of the light and beauty
That dwell in nature; of the heavenly forms
We worship in our dreams, and the soft hues
That stain the wild bird’s wing and flush the clouds
When the sun sets. Within her tender eye
The heaven of April, with its changing light,
And when it wears the blue of May, is hung,
And on her lip the rich, red rose. Her hair
Is like the summer tresses of the trees,
When twilight makes them brown, and on her cheek
Blushes the richness of an autumn sky,
With ever-shifting beauty. Then her breath,
It is so like the gentle air of Spring,
As, from the morning’s dewy flowers, it comes
Full of their fragrance, that it is a joy
To have it round us, and her silver voice
Is the rich music of a summer bird,
Heard in the till night, with its passionate cadence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) was an American poet and educator, and one of the monumental cultural figures of nineteenth-century America.

To read more poems, click here.

Ghosts

5th November 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox

This is post 55 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

There are ghosts in the room.
As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there
They come out of the gloom,
And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair

    There’s a ghost of a Hope
That lighted my days with a fanciful glow,
In her hand is the rope
That strangled her life out. Hope was slain long ago.

    But her ghost comes to-night
With its skeleton face and expressionless eyes,
And it stands in the light,
And mocks me, and jeers me with sobs and with sighs.

    There’s the ghost of a Joy,
A frail, fragile thing, and I prized it too much,
And the hands that destroy
Clasped its close, and it died at the withering touch.

    There’s the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others—this ghost; yet a ghost at the best,

    I am weary, and fain
Would forget all these dead: but the gibbering host
Make my struggle in vain—
In each shadowy corner there lurketh a ghost.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919) was an American poet and journalist.

To read more poems, click here.

Mihaela Limberea

Category: Poetry

Jabberwocky

Things Said When He Was Gone

My Heart Has Known Its Winter

Winter Night

January

The City Lights

Journey of the Magi

Nightfall in the Tropics

The Spirit of Poetry

Ghosts

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