True Poems, with a Morrissey flavour

[goinghome]

Home is so Sad​

by Philip Larkin (1922 –1985)

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

 

[goinghome]

An almost lost epic that won a national poetry competition in 1991. It's graphic and gritty; apologies in advance. I particularly admire the line near the end that starts, 'for their stage was not...' The spoken version is by a well-known folk singer, and imo, does it proud.

 

[goinghome]

Come Let Us Be Friends​

by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming


Come, let us be friends, you and I,
E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high
That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
The world hath her surplus of hatred today;
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
And love each other so deep and so well,
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.

- https://poets.org/poem/come-let-us-be-friends

 

[goinghome]

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate,