Poetry in Miniature

[a collection of snippets and scraps]

[aurai-deactivated20130512]

What can be explained is not poetry.

W.B. Yeats (via aurai)

[poetryinminiature]

ode (eyes)

your eyes were always overcast like the sky on the day we kissed and you told me you were leaving we walked on the pier a goodbye to the sea and to me there was no sun to warm my skin no wind to chill my bones strange for this city, always so blustery the sea was still so i felt nothing your eyes were always overcast and you, already gone

As always, comments and critique are more than welcome!

This one came out oddly mopey. Not based on reality.

[ashwrites]

a haiku for you.

[poetryinminiature]

notwritenow:

Wrong words stacked too high

will topple—a story needs

foundation to stand.

[poetryinminiature]

Hotel Soaps

The soaps my great aunt left behind were labeled with the stories of her life: each taken from a hotel bathroom, then cataloged with place and date of whence they came, of where she’d been, of how the weather was that winter, 1964 in Innsbruck: an unseasonable lack of snow. It was on that trip she met her second husband, my great uncle, the man who sits beside me as I sort the memories he shared with his beloved into little piles of little soaps, marked in her scrawl with the places and the dates she left behind.

A new poem, begun yesterday.  Feedback is appreciated.

[poetryinminiature]

Songs

I sat there singing her Songs in the dark. She said; 'I do not understand The words'. I said; 'There are No words'.

-Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

[poetryinminiature]

After Apple-Picking

(I'm going apple-picking today!)

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now.

-Robert Frost (1874-1963)

[poetryinminiature]

A Supermarket in California

[poetryinminiature]

-singforabsolution:

poetryinminiature:

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

-Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

i imitated this poem for my poetry class, it’s called “a supercenter in the suburbs” and it’s pretty much the only poem of mine i legitimately love 

I'd love to read it, if you feel like submitting... poems based on other pieces of writing are sort of a weakness of mine!

[poetryinminiature]

Tree, tree dry and green. The girl with the pretty face is out picking olives.

-Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)

[poetryinminiature]

A Supermarket in California

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

-Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

[poetryinminiature]

All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood; I turned and looked another way, And saw three islands in a bay. So with my eyes I traced the line Of the horizon, thin and fine, Straight around till I was come Back to where I'd started from; And all I saw from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

[poetryinminiature]

Visit Original Link

"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(read by Kirsten Ferreri for Short Poetry Collection 013 at Librivox.org)

[poetryinminiature]

I just want to make sure you poetry lovers know about Librivox! It's a source for free audiobooks (including lots of poetry) read by volunteers from public-domain works. A lot of them are really great! I'll be posting some of my personal favorites sporadically on this blog.

[deadwriters-blog]

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Edgar Allan Poe (via deadwriters)

[poetryinminiature]

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge of my affection and think, "It's beautiful here by this pond. I wish somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them."

-Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)

[fuckyeahpoetry]

[poetryinminiature]

fuckyeahpoetry:

I saw the dove come down, the dove with the green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and flood. It came towards me in the style of the Holy Spirit descending. I had been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. It hovered over the great ...

[poetryinminiature]

Requiem (After Paul Simon)

we are driving from the church to the gravesite blinkers on listening to graceland my godmother and i but really she is driving; i am thinking about the way we all have come together with windows in our hearts in mourning and in wonder at the way that life goes by my family is large on that side: four aunts, three uncles, countless cousins a grandmother by blood and one by marriage bound together by this man, now dead his soul ascended to wherever it is the soul goes when one has led a life that was complex, but mostly good my father was a child of his first marriage and never quite the perfect son though he did try, the clan was fractured down many separate roads that never merged and rarely met; each path originating at the source but disparate from the rest the priest, an irish catholic man (much like the people he addressed) recited very little verse but comforted his crowd instead with words of seasons changing cyclical in nature: we are reborn in spring and yes it is my grandfather who died one day in early spring near easter but we laid to rest our differences and worked to resurrect our love as traveling companions now our roads have come together we are pilgrims to this place so we gathered in the church that wednesday morning remembering a life that touched us all it opened every heart to one another - and yes i do have reason to believe: we all will be received in graceland

So now that I've posted some of my favorite poems and excerpts from poems, I thought the level of awesome on this blog was getting a little too high... a perfect time for some of my own in-progress writing to bring it down a bit!

Feedback is more than welcome: be honest but kind. (Also, if anyone wants to submit their own writing for comments, I'd be delighted not to be the only amateur posting work.)

[poetryinminiature]

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Sonnet, Billy Collins (1941-)