Pomes upon Pomes

[Berzee]

Pomes are just like short books, right? If you have a favored pome, maybe you can post that pome here. Or, if it is a long pome, maybe you can break off a piece of it to put here and leave directions to the rest of it, LIKE SO:

 

"The Song of the Wheels" by G.K. Chesterton (full pome here)

 

King Dives he was walking in his garden all alone,
Where his flowers are made of iron and his trees are made of stone,
And his hives are full of thunder and the lightning leaps and kills,

For the mills of God grind slowly; and he works with other mills.
Dives found a mighty silence; and he missed the throb and leap,
The noise of all the sleepless creatures singing him to sleep.
And he said: "A screw has fallen---or a bolt has slipped aside---
Some little thing has shifted": and the little things replied:

"Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels;
We are taking rest, master, finding how it feels,
Strict the law of thine and mine: theft we ever shun---
All the wheels are thine, master---tell the wheels to run!
Yea, the Wheels are mighty gods---set them going then!
We are only men, master, have you heard of men?

 

[Berzee]

Also, in the "what is the I don't even" category, this poem from shopliftwindchimes.com -- "The Day They Make Me Gorgeous" (sound recording)

[juv3nal]

I like George Oppen a lot a lot:

 

We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always.   Crusoe

We say was
'Rescued'.
So we have chosen.

from here

[juv3nal]

also the Paul Schmidt translation of Rimbaud's Enfance:

At the edge of the forest, where dream flowers chime,
Brighten and break…
An orange-lipped girl, her knees crossed
In the bright flood that rolls from the fields;
Nudity covered, shadowed and clothed
By rainbows, flowers, and the sea.

***

There is a clock that never strikes.

There is a little swamp, with a nest of pale animals.

***

There is a troupe of tiny strolling players all dressed up,
Seen on the road at the edge of the woods.

And when you are hungry or thirsty,
There is always someone to chase you away.

(only an excerpt but all I could find online; er, there's full translations of the poem available, but not the P.S. translation which is BETTAR)

[osmosisch]

Oh hey, an excuse to re-read The Waste Land

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

After the torch-light red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and place and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Oh and:

W. B. Yeats

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Max Ernst]

Al Purdy was cool as heck:

 

At The Quinte Hotel

I am drinking
I am drinking yellow flowers
in underground sunlight
and you can see that I am a sensitive man
and I notice that the bartender is a sensitive man
so I tell him the beer he draws
is half fart and half horse piss
and all wonderful yellow flowers
But the bartender is not quite
so sensitive as I supposed he was
the way he looks at me now
and does not appreciate my exquisite analogy
Over in one corner two guys
are quietly making love
in the brief prelude to infinity
Opposite them a peculiar fight
enables the drinkers to lay aside
their comic books and watch with interest
while I watch with interest
a wiry little man slugs another guy
then tracks him bleeding into the toliet
and slugs him to the floor again
with ugly red flowers on the tile
three minutes later he roosters over
to the table where his drunk friend sits
with another friend and slugs both
of em ass-over-electric-kettle
so I have to walk around
on my way for a piss
Now I am a sensitive man
so I say to him mildly as hell
"You shouldn'ta knocked over that good beer
with them beautiful flowers in it"
So he says "Come on"
So I Come On
like a rabbit with weak kidneys I guess
like a yellow streak charging
on flower power I suppose
& knock the shit outa him & sit on him
(he is just a little guy)
and say reprovingly
"Violence will get you nowhere this time chum
Now you take me
I am a sensitive man
and would you believe I write poems?"
But I could see the doubt in his upside down face
in fact in all the faces
"What kind of poems?"
"Flower poems"
"So tell us a poem"
I got off the little guy but reluctantly
for he was comfortable
and told them this poem
They crowded around me with tears
in their eyes and wrung my hands feelingly
for my pockets for
it was a heart-warming moment for literature
and moved bt the demonstrable effect
of great Art and the brotherhood of people I remarked
"-the poem oughta be worth some beer"
It was a mistake in terminology
for silence came
and it was brought home to me in the tavern
that poems will not realy buy beer or flowers
or a goddam thing
and I was sad
for I am a sensitive man

 

Bonus video of Purdy reading the poem to amazing visuals:

[Gormongous]

One of my favorite poems, because I like feeling sorry for myself: "A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century", by Linda Pastan

 

The rabbis wrote:

although it is forbidden

to touch a dying person,

nevertheless, if the house catches fire

he must be removed

from the house.

 

Barbaric!

I say, 

and whom may I touch then,

aren't we all

dying?

 

You smile

your old negotiator's smile

and ask:

but aren't all our houses 

burning?