Unlike many of you, I love poetry. I love it more than novels, more than movies, sometimes even more than music. I buy a lot of contemporary poets' works, so, I will post poems by artists no one here has probably ever read:
By Wendell Berry--because it expresses completely how I feel about my best friend/the love of my life.
Except
Now that you have gone
and I am alone and quiet,
my contentment would be
complete, if I did not wish
you were here so I could say,
"How good it is, Tanya,
to be alone and quiet."
And this is the poem that means a lot to me, because I've moved many, many times in my life, and it's hard to explain to people you leave behind what it's like when/if you meet again. It's by Denise Levertov who has some great poems and some poems that are only great if you're a huge lover of nature as she was.
from...Everything That Acts Is Actual
The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?
The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
And to end, a poem by one of the US's poet laureates, Richard Wilbur. I like this poem, because it's about the way our definitions of beauty change just as we ourselves change and the world around us changes.
The Beautiful Changes
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of
you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that
says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding,
to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to
wonder.
This was a great post. I need to go read more now!
