Favourite Poetry Thread

[RedAnarchist]

We already have a thread for our own poetry, so i thought we could have one for our favourite poems rather than one's we've created.

[Taiga]

I've posted it once. I'm gonna post it again ;)

Left March

By Vladimir Mayakovsky

For the Red Marines: 1918


Rally the ranks into a march!
Now's no time to quibble or browse there.
Silence, you orators!
You
have the floor,
Comrade Mauser.
Enough of living by laws
that Adam and Eve have left.
Hustle old history's horse.
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

Ahoy, blue jackets!
Cross the sky-moats!
Beyond the oceans!
Unless
your battleships on the roads
blunted their keels' fighting keenness!
Baring the teeth of his crown,
let
the lion of Britain whine, gale-heft.
The commune can never go down.
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

There-
beyond sorrow's peaks,
sunlit lands uncharted.
Against hunger,
against plague's dark seas,
the marching of millions has started!
Let armies of hirelings ambush us,
streaming cold steel through every rift, -
L'Entente can't conquer the Russians,
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

Does the eye of the eagle fade?
Shall we stare back to the old?
Proletarian fingers
the throat of the world
still tighter hold!
Chests out!
Shoulders straight!
Stick to the sky red flags adrift!
Whose marching there with the right?!!
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT!

The last verse sounds like a RevLeft anthem :rolleyes:
Just adore Mayakovsky :)

[Morag]

My favourite poem is Howl (http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl.shtml), by Ginsberg. To long to post here, but the beginning gets me every time.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo [...]

[Free Left]

This is one of my favourite poems, so simple.

EPIC by PATRICK KAVANAGH, 1938

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided : who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.

I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."

That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important ? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said : I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

[Tekun]

Among many of my favs, Keats' "Bright Star" is always awesome


Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death