Poetry Please

[C_Claycomb]

With ink and quill, the poets seek
To craft their rhymes both sly and sleek,
But some, alas, descend so low
To tales where coarser fancies go.

They trade in jest of bawdy kind,
With wit that's crude, and oft maligned.
No subtle turn, no clever art-
Just laughter drawn from vulgar start.

Oh, muse! Lift up your glowing torch,
Let not such verses scorch the porch
Where gentle words and wisdom meet,
And lyric grace makes lines discreet.

There's beauty found in words restrained,
In mysteries left unexplained.
Let not the bawdy steal the stage-
Hold high the honor of the page.

 

[C_Claycomb]

In other words, let’s try not to descend any further gutter-wards.

 

[Pattree]

Sum Limerick

(12 + 144 + 20 + 3 x √4) +(5x11) = 9^2 +0
7

 

[Pattree]

A dozen, a gross and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is exactly nine squared and no more.

 

[slaine_23]

Now don’t anyone be quoting Shakespeare or Catalllus, though the latter especially can be quite filthy.

 

[William_Montgomery]

'The Laughing Heart'

Your life is your life
Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
Be on the watch.
There are ways out.
There is a light somewhere.
It may not be much light but
It beats the darkness.
Be on the watch.
The gods will offer you chances.
Know them.
Take them.
You can’t beat death but
You can beat death in life, sometimes.
And the more often you learn to do it,
The more light there will be.
Your life is your life.
Know it while you have it.
You are marvelous
The gods wait to delight
In you.

 

[Toddy]

Now don’t anyone be quoting Shakespeare or Catalllus, though the latter especially can be quite filthy.

Martial could be so sarcastic

"The golden hair that Galla wears
Is hers: who would have thought it?
She swears 'tis hers, and true she swears,
For I know where she bought it."

 

[slaine_23]

Know many,
And trust a few,
But always paddle
Your own canoe.

 

[Broch]

Despite the love you feel
and the joy you radiate
there are those misguided persons in the world
who would see you harmed.

They will confront you with fists
or await you in the darkness with blades drawn.

Do not fear them
or become angry with them.

Allow your heart to hold the emptiness of purity.
Your receptive spirit will hear the sadness and rage
of your attackers’ intentions
and your body will flow
with the winds of their hatred.
You will take them to the destruction they seek.

And as the dust settles
and the blood dries
do not let your own joy decrease
nor find the world any less beautiful
simply because some persons refuse to see you

with eyes that love

Ninja poem

 

[Laurentius]

Now don’t anyone be quoting Shakespeare or Catalllus, though the latter especially can be quite filthy.

There was a young lady of Ealing, who had a peculiar feeling ....

 

[Laurentius]

Granted that it has been described as the most misunderstood poem of all time, but I am of the school that it is the reader who makes the meaning and not the poet, and that makes all the difference

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

[crosslandkelly]

Ozymandias​

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 –1822​

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”