Poetry Archives - Page 2 of 10

Squirrel

22nd October 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry Wildlife

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This is post 54 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Red squirrel climbing an oak tree in the winter

Swift and agile
Sleek and prehensile –
Skittering across bark
And as dexterously over brick –
Squirrel.
The arch survivor –
A thief in woodland
A bandit of suburbia,
Beautiful peanut pirate.
You skim the rigging of
Rotary washing lines
And old telephone wires:
Your sail-tail
A Spinnaker of balance –
A back garden acrobat.
Grey down of fur covers
The machine of sinew
Tendons tight
Like bowstrings
Wired to shoot across
Fence top,
Gate post, sign post,
Post box – post haste.
The highwayman of the high street,
Terror of the terraces
Ply your profession –
Livelihood in the manmade Landscape.
A narrow escape
With a clutch of grapes
Hijacked from garden vine
Jam-packed with sweet juice.
You make a getaway
Into ornamental spruce
Where you have your hideaway.

by Finn Farnsworth who came second in the People Need Nature competition set on the Young Poets’ Network.

To read more poems, click here.

Vas Doloris

15th October 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Julián del Casal

This is post 53 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Shadow of a lace curtain on a white wall, photograph in B&W.

I come from the remote borders
of the land of oblivion. My songs
will not sound beneath your balconies,
I am the singer of the broken sanctuaries.

Artist, dreamer, sensitive and tender,
my music is a voice of affirmation . . .
I am like a winter twilight
in love’s garden.

I love the fire of the sun. My delights are
the flaming rose, the bleeding pink,
and I love the white swans on the lakes
and the blue clouds in the wind.

I love the sad—for life is Pain—
I love your black half-opened eyes
fixed in an unknown direction
where dead loves are forgotten.

I know full well that love is sleep . . .
and my soul sleepless. You are not
to blame for my sorrow. You are a dream . . .
I call you when I wake and you do not come!

You can come only as does death,
silent and fatal. You are anxiety,
no matter, come; my heart is strong . . .
Shed your petals in my hands, faded rose.

I knew in my dreams that love is good
and today, impenitent, a rebel against love,
I weep upon the lilies of your breast
and kiss you on the forehead.

Julián del Casal (1863 – 1893) was a Cuban poet and one of the most important forerunners of the Modernist movement in Latin America

Translated from the Spanish by William George Williams.

To read more poems, click here.

The River

8th October 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Manuel José Othón

This is post 52 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Jebel Kissu, in northwestern Sudan, emerges abruptly like an island in the vast Sahara Desert. The plateau is the eroded remnant of a granite dome. The bright linear features are truck tracks, common in the Sahara where there are no paved roads.

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

With graceful waves, ye waters, frolic free;
   Uplift your liquid songs, ye eddies bright,
   And you, loquacious bubblings, day and night,
Hold converse with the wind and leaves in glee!
O’er the deep cut, ye jets, gush sportively.
   And rend yourselves to foamy tatters white,
   And dash on boulders curved and rocks upright,
Golconda’s pearls and diamonds rich to see!
I am your sire, the River. Lo, my hair
   Is moonbeams pale: of yon cerulean sky
      Mine eyes are mirrors, as I sweep along.
Of molten spray is my forehead fair;
   Transparent mosses for my beard have I;
The laughter of the Naiads’ is my song.

Manuel José Othón (1858 – 1906) was a Mexican poet, playwright, and politician.

^{Translated from the Spanish by Alice Stone Blackwell}

To read more poems, click here.

[Say What You Will, And Scratch My Heart To Find]

24th September 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is post 51 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
The roots of last year’s roses in my breast;
I am as surely riper in my mind
As if the fruit stood in the stalls confessed.
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.

My branches weigh me down, frost cleans the air.
My sky is black with small birds bearing south;
Say what you will, confuse me with fine care,
Put by my word as but an April truth,—
Autumn is no less on me that a rose
Hugs the brown bough and sighs before it goes.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright.

To read more poems, click here.

Bluebird and Cardinal

17th September 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Karle Wilson Baker

This is post 50 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Cardinal bird sitting on a tree branch overlooking a valley and a river at sunset

                                  I
Thou winged symbol of the quiet mind,
Thou straying violet, flying flower of spring,
Heaven-hued and heaven-hearted! Thou dost sing
As thou some sweet remembered thought didst find,
And, counseling with thyself in musing kind,
Didst softly say it over. Thy swift wing
Knows but a quiet rhythm; thou a thing
Of peace, to passion innocently blind.

Thy russet breast means married love, long hope,
Sheltered experience, small and sweet and sure.
All of the brown earth’s natural purity;
But something heavenly, beyond our scope,
Steeped thy blue wing in color strange and pure,
Intense and holy as the mirrored sky.
                                  II
Pulse of the gorgeous world, jubilant, strong,—
Thy song a whistled splendor, and thy coat
A fiery song! From thy triumphant throat
How I have heard it pouring, loud and long.
Whipping the air as with a scarlet thong—
The joyous lashing of thy triple note
Which all the tamer noonday noises smote
And clove a royal pathway through the throng!

Thou singest joy of battle, joy of fame.
Glory, and love of woman; joy of strife
With life’s wild fates; and scorn’st, with jocund breath
For prudence’ sake to dim thy feathered flame—
Thou heart of fire, epitome of life,
Full-throated flouter of vindictive death!
                                  III
And lo, among the leafy, hidden groves
Within my heart, they both do flit and nest,
Saintly blue wing and vaunting scarlet crest,
Yea, all of life and all its myriad loves.
Even as Nature holds them, sifts and proves
And balances, so shall my soul find rest
In Her large tolerance, which without rest
Or lagging, toward some wide conclusion moves.

So, though I weary sometimes of the stress,
Leave me not, little lovers of the air.
Dearest of Nature’s fine antitheses!
Thou of the musing voice and heavenly dress.
Thou, royal firebrand,—neither could I spare.
My scarlet Passion, nor my winged Peace!

Karle Wilson Baker (1878 – 1960) was An American writer.

To read more poems, click here.

Incurable

10th September 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Dorothy Parker Flowers

This is post 49 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned;
The calmer, I, to see it true
That ways of love are never new—
The love that sets you daft and dazed
Is every love that ever blazed;
The happier, I, to fathom this:
A kiss is every other kiss.
The reckless vow, the lovely name,
When Helen walked, were spoke the same;
The weighted breast, the grinding woe,
When Phaon fled, were ever so.
Oh, it is sure as it is sad
That any lad is every lad,
And what’s a girl, to dare implore
Her dear be hers forevermore?
Though he be tried and he be bold,
And swearing death should he be cold,
He’ll run the path the others went.…
But you, my sweet, are different.

Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967) was an American poet and writer of fiction, plays, and screenplays known for her caustic wisecracks.

To read more poems, click here.

At The Pool

3rd September 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Effie Lee Newsome

This is post 48 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

I like to stand right still awhile
Beside some forest pool.
The reeds around it smell so fresh,
The waters look so cool!
Sometimes I just hop in and wade,
And have a lot of fun,
Playing with bugs that dart across
The water in the sun.

They lodge here at this little pool—
All sorts of bugs and things
That hop about its shady banks,
Or dart along with wings,
Or scamper on the water top,
As water-striders go,
Or strange back-swimmers upside down,
Using their legs to row,
Or the stiff, flashing dragon flies,
The gentle damoiselle,
The clumsy, sturdy water-bugs,
And scorpions as well,
That come on top to get fresh air
From homes beneath the pool,
Where water-boatmen have their nooks,
On pebbles, as a rule.

And then, behold! Kingfisher comes,
That great big royal bird!
To him what is the dragon fly
That kept the pool life stirred?
Or water-tigers terrible
That murder bugs all day?
Kingfisher comes, and each of these
Would hide itself away!

He swoops and swallows what he will,
A stone-fly or a frog.
Wing’d things rush frightened through the air,
Others to hole and log.
The little pool that held them all
I watch grow very bare,
But fisher knows his hide and seek—
He’ll find some one somewhere!

Effie Lee Newsome (1885–1979) was a Harlem Renaissance writer who mainly wrote children’s poems.

To read more poems, click here.

Acceptance

13th August 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Robert Frost

This is post 47 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was an American poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, most known for The Road Not Taken (a poem often read during graduation ceremonies), Fire and Ice, Mending Wall, Nothing Gold Can Stay, and Home Burial.

To read more poems, click here.

The Red Wheelbarrow

6th August 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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William Carlos Williams

This is post 46 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

The red wheelbarrow in the rain with white chickens

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was an American poet and physician, closely associated with modernism and imagism.

To read more poems, click here.

Sonnet

30th July 2024 Mihaela Limberea

Poetry

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

This is post 45 of 64 in the series “Poetry Tuesday”

This is a series of poems published every Tuesday.

Oh for a poet—for a beacon bright
To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;
To spirit back the Muses, long astray,
And flush Parnassus with a newer light;
To put these little sonnet-men to flight
Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way,
Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,
To vanish in irrevocable night,

What does it mean, this barren age of ours?
Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,
The seasons, and the sunset, as before.
What does it mean? Shall there not one arise
To wrench one banner from the western skies,
And mark it with his name forevermore?

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935) was an American poet and playwright.

To read more poems, click here.

Mihaela Limberea

Category: Poetry

Squirrel

Vas Doloris

The River

[Say What You Will, And Scratch My Heart To Find]

Bluebird and Cardinal

Incurable

At The Pool

Acceptance

The Red Wheelbarrow

Sonnet

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