It can give you the gift of an experience or emotion, just
through letting your eyes run over a few words. Your mind does the rest. So
much of it can be felt, and tasted, and yet not thoroughly comprehended or
understood. That's the beauty of it.
Here are a few poems that have sparked my imagination
recently.
Your patience in reading them will definitely reward you!
Look at the Way the Sky Breaks Under Us by Emma Shi is so exquisitely beautiful it will carry you off in its arms...
I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.
Dulce
et Decorum Est
By
Wilfred Owen
NOTES: Latin phrase is from the Roman
poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Look
at the Way the Sky Breaks Under Us
Emma
Shi
When the plane came down, it smashed right through my
heart. I was pinned under the beautiful wing and you were running wild with the
fire and I heard you screaming. You were screaming so, so loud, and I imagined
your (black/blonde/brown) hair covered in ash. I imagined the fire melting your
skin away where it would bleed into the earth, where the trees would then use
the light in your wrists as food, and release it to be inhaled by some other
person who has forgotten the color of flowers
(breath in, breath in, breath out).
I couldn’t see you but I felt you there, tugging at my
strings, even thought there was this metal against my legs and it was burning,
burning. Everything was burning and I almost choked on the fire like all the
people before us who believed they were invincible.
And when they finally came for us, my legs were dead and
all of you was broken. Your skin was melting into the soil, the trees grabbing
at your light, their roots reaching for your cells to release them to the last
of the butterflies, and I inhaled it and it tasted like the stars. It tasted
like clear oceans and it collected like dust in my lungs and it stung against
my tongue. It stung, it stung, it stung, (and
breathe in, breathe in, breath
out).
In
Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 54
Alfred,
Lord Tennyson
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the
final end of ill,
To pangs of
nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not
one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as
rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a
moth with vain desire
Is
shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but
trust that good shall fall
At last—far
off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant
crying in the night:
An infant
crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
To
----
Percy
Bysshe Shelley
One word is too often profaned
For me to
profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to
disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence
to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from
another.
I can give not
what men call love,
But wilt thou accept
not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the
Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night
for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the
sphere of our sorrow?
