A Bit of Poetry to Inspire You

Poetry is so inspiring, isn't it?

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?