This Poem

 

This poem squats in a desert place.

This poem perches upon your chamber door;

This poem sings, your face your face your face

This poem is merely this and nothing more.

This poem is a traveler from an antique land.

This poem is what you find in the windmills of your mind.

This poem is the lone and level sand. 

This poem is old anarchy to the horizon line.

This poem sees the best minds of your generation.

This poem says, let us go then, you and I.

This poem is tearful lamentations

This poem has a silent lifting mind.

I sing myself and celebrate myself

and that, dear lady, were no crime;

if life is over there--behind a shelf

there you'll find these poems--in one of mine.

________

A bit of doggerel for What's Going On? "Poetry Is..."

I have referenced:

Stephen Crane "In A Desert Place"

E.A. Poe "The Raven"

Ewan MacColl "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

Percy Bysshe Shelley "Ozymandias"

Alan and Marilyn Bergman "The Windmills of Your Mind" (English lyrics)

Sylvia Plath "The Colossus"

Allen Ginsberg "Howl" (altered)

t.s. eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Francesco Petrarch "The Triumph of Death"

John Gillespie Magee Jr. "High Flight"

Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress" (altered)

Emily Dickinson "I Cannot Live With You"

Give

Too bright the light

While the succubus sleeps.

Too harsh, too hard

The concrete skin of sun-bitten streets.



Give her the moon.

Give her horned creatures standing silent in the silver light.

Give her owl's eye and raven's claw in velvet pouch of night.

Give her a home in a deep-scored bone.



No one dreams well while the world burns bright.

No whisper can survive the stabbing beak of noon.

Let the succubus wake when the river runs black,

Reflecting sinking stars that flow ever slowly down.



Give her the moon and your silver-lit dream.

Leave your hair spread easy, and a lantern on the boom.

Kiss her in the darkling depths,

Her sweet deep-blue renown.

_____

painting: The Lorelei, by J.W.Waterhouse

linked to One Shot Wednesday