Post your favorite poem.

[carter08]

Here is mine.

Autobiography, 1952 by Yehuda Amichai


My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard
and I left it once, before I was finished
and he remained there with his big, empty worry
and my mother was like a tree on the shore
between her arms that stretched out toward me

And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small
and in ’41 they learned to use a gun
and when I first fell in love
my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
and the girl’s white hand held them all
by a thin string- then let them fly away

And in ’51 the motion of my life
was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship
and my father’s face like the headlight on the front of a tram
growing smaller and smaller in the distance
and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet
and as I walked up my street
the twentieth century was the blood in my veins

blood that wanted to get our in many wars
and through many openings
that’s why it knocks against my head from the inside
and reached my heart in angry waves


but now, in the spring of ’52, I see
that more birds have returned than left last winter
and I walk back down the hill to my house
and in my room the woman, whose body is heavy
and filled with time

[IHStangFan]

District 30 is goin down.

The End.

[TheDOCTORdre]

Invictus


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

[JJWalker]

There once was a man from Nantucket ...