Thursday, November 17, 2005

What's your favorite poem?

I pulled my copy of e.e. cumming's complete poems off the shelf to weigh down E.'s blankets (so she doesn't pull them up over her head during the night). It got me thinking about the most wonderful poem of all time (#22 in New Poems from the Collected Poems). The last 2 lines of my favorite lines of all time.


you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys maynothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress, and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

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