Got faves? Post 'em. I'll start... [?="In the Desert"] In the Desert In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said: "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter-bitter," he answered; "But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart." - Stephen Crane, from Black Riders and Other Tales[/?] [?="On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness"] On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness, by Arthur Guiterman The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls Of mastodons, are billiard balls. The sword of Charlemagne the Just Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust. The grizzly bear, whose potent hug, Was feared by all, is now a rug. Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf, And I don't feel so well myself...[/?] I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. I, the professor trembling absurdly on the platform with my book and spectacles, am the single philosophical animal. I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light. - Loren Corey Eiseley, from The Firmament of Time [?="Rilke, on darkness..."] You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them!- powers and people- and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights. from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke[/?] [?="Ode to the Alien"] Ode to the Alien Beast, I've known you in all love's countries, in a baby's face knotted like walnut meat, in the crippled obbligato of a polio-stricken friend, in my father's eyes pouchy as two marsupials, in the grizzly radiance of a winter sunset, in my lover's arm veined like the blue-ridge mountains. To me, you are beautiful until proven ugly. Anyway, I'm no cosmic royalty either: I'm a bastard of matter descended from countless rapes and invasions of cell upon cell upon cell. I crawled out of the slime; I swung through the jungles of Madagascar; I drew wildebeest on the caves at Lascaux; I lived a grim life hunting peccary and maize in some godforsaken mudhole in the veldt. I may squeal from the pointy terror of a wasp, or shun the breezy rhetoric of a fire; but, whatever your form, gait, or healing you are no beast to me, I who am less than a heart-flutter from the brute, I who have been beastly so long. Like me, you are that pool of quicksilver in the mist, fluid, shimmery, fleeing, called life. And life, full of pratfall and poise, life where a bit of frost one morning can turn barbed wire into a string of stars, life aromatic with red-hot pizzazz drumming ha-cha-cha through every blurt, nub, sag pang, twitch, war, bloom of it, life as unlikely as a pelican, or a thunderclap, life's our tour of duty on our far-flung planets, our cage, our dole, our reverie. Have you arts? Do waves dash over your brain like tide rip along a rocky coast? Does your moon slide into the night's back pocket, just full when it begans to wane, so that all joy seems interim? Are you flummoxed by that millpond, deep within the atom, rippling out to every star? Even if your blood is quarried, I pray you well, and hope my prayer your tonic. I sit at my desk now like a tiny proprietor, a cottage industry in every cell. Diversity is my middle name. My blood runs laps; I doubt yours does, but we share an abstract fever called thought, a common swelter of a sun. So, Beast, pause a moment, you are welcome here. I am life, and life loves life. - Diane Ackerman, from Wife of Light[/?]
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. - Herman Melville "Only connect!" That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. - E.M. Forster, Howard's End From the point of view of a man alienated from its source creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins. - R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience ...the truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and that one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs . . . The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees . . . - Proust, Remembrance of Things Past I am every man and no man, and will be so to the end. This is why I must tell the story as I may. Not for the nameless name upon the page, not for the trails behind me that faded or led nowhere, not for the rooms at nightfall where I slept from exhaustion or did not sleep at all, not for the confusion of where I was to go, or if I had a destiny recognizable by any star. No, in retrospect it was the loneliness of not knowing, not knowing at all. - Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth. - Mitsugi Saotome Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. - Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H To the day of our deaths we exist in an inner solitude that is linked to the nature of life itself. Even as we project an affection upon others we endure a loneliness which is the price of all individual consciousness - the price of living. - Loren C. Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that. - Charlotte, Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White EDIT: Trimmed a bit...
I would suggest slowing down and not bogging the rest of us down. Personally I feel less interested in posting anything because of your over-abundant examples. Just a suggestion, but maybe post one or two at a time. You still have time to edit your posts, and I do genuinely feel it would be more welcoming to further posts if you did cut it down a tad. Or you could spoiler each poem. Maybe choose one or two quotes instead of 50 (hyperbole, maybe ). Oh, and my contribution: "The oldest and greatest emotion of mankind is fear. The oldest and greatest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -H.P. Lovecraft (probably paraphrased, I can't recall exactly)
Yeah, okay...I was just trying to get the ball rolling...(and I wasn't gonna follow up until there were - hopefully - a few of other posts...in fact, I will be gone most of the afternoon and evening, so...) Oh, and anyone know how to post a spoiler tag where the title of the poem is in the tag??? Oh yeah...and Lovecraft...he has some great ones. So does Poe...
