Ask Lemmy

Little potato when it is born
Spreads its branches on the ground
Little girl when she sleeps
Puts her hand on her heart

I am tiny
The size of a button
I carry daddy in my pocket
And mommy in my heart

The pocket got a hole
And daddy fell on the ground
Mommy who is the dearest
Stayed in my heart

Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning just rolled around in my head for day after I first read it. It’s really dark but feels so completely human at the same time.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46313/porphyrias-lover

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse

I'm partial to To make a prairie by Emily Dickinson:

To make a prairie it takes a clover 
      and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

I enjoy the simplicity. Also, there's a great choir setting by Rudolf Escher which I really enjoy.

Not particularly original, but I’m a sucker for William Blake. I love a neurodivergent radical. And I’m also am not particularly well read in poetry, so if there are any other poets that fit that description I always love to hear about more!

The Tyger is probably my favorite of his. I can feel the rhythm of it in my heart, and it’s made so much more tangible in its fear and awe when you know that he wrote it after seeing a young man killed by a tiger.

Li Bai - Quiet Night Thought

床前明月光
疑是地上霜
举头望明月
低头思故乡

Before my bed bright moonlight pools
Almost like frost on the ground
Raising my head I see the shining moon
Bowing my head I think of home

I really like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. I first encountered it as a result of reading Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels, but one day I saw the original in the library and just read it from start to finish. It's fantastic, so weird, so compelling.

I also like his Kubla Khan, the imagery of the "caverns measureless to man" and the "sunless sea" have always stuck with me.

Dolce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen. A grim, anti-war masterpiece written by a soldier fighting in the trenches in WW1

Ozymandias - Percy Shelley. A reminder of human transience and hubris

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas. Helps me to endure when things seem bleak or hopeless.

Ozymandias, because it's one of the very few I've read, and I liked it.

Invictus by William Ernst Henley

When I was younger I clung to it's message of perseverance. It ended up being the first poem that I ever memorized.

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.

This Bread I Break by Dylan Thomas

It’s a short, beautiful poem that laments man’s destructive relationship with nature.

Mark Strand - Keeping things whole. It helps me deal with depression. I find it very soothing when I'm feeling down. It's one of the few I know by heart.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Richard Cory

A surprising poem on a dark subject matter. Perhaps one of the best poems that demonstrate how mysterious other people are and how hard it is to truly connect with strangers.

Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein.