Originally Posted by Del Boy

really like that Willbond poem. great.

Hear, hear. Very well written. And a good message to boot.

One of my favorites by E. A. Poe.

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


TAKE this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

I wrote this last year for Eng. 3, probably one of the last serious works I wrote for the teacher, who was sadly one of my favorites.

Inconsistency- The Pianist’s Eye

“I always play what I feel. I’m always me, but I’m a different me every day. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.” Errol Garner

Hark! The old audience greets me.
Helo to my aged companions;
a lamp, sofa, that old rocker
with a snapped arm.

I take my seat- my hands forget
their broken blisters
as upon the ivories they lay.
The fingertips register
the first kisses of the keys.
The hands are the unloved offspring of
leather reins, machetes, and good old work.
In this small living room
Two temporary beings united for a period
only to be split again by unloved reality.

Garner’s advice rings clear with me;
I shall play what I am.
Ragtime, blues, Beethoven
Williams, Tucker, Jones.
What I am seems inconsistent.

From fingertip to hammer
cord to chord
melody and harmony are created
or maybe destroyed.
Metronomes find no stall here
The rhythms are flexible- they are apt to change
For beauty and its arguments are inconsistent.

The Wurlitzer is one voice, accompanied by another.
Its notes vary- it stutters, flows legato, and gains
a certain volume. The lows and highs
may be extreme in pitch and volume
or more often just a shy, muffled gasp of the wires.
Hark, beauty is inconsistent.

Pena moans, Nelson drawls
Van Zant growls and Gershwin rings
some strange noises accompanied by
the oft-agonized rants of the pianist.
Where musicians’ tools are not always welcome
The musicians are accepted with arms spread wide.
‘Tis not hypocrisy, simply inconsistency.
Expression sometimes abandons the norm,
hence inconsistency.

Awesome deerslayer. I love that...I'm quoting a line.

Agreed, I consider it an amazing poem - amazing poet.

I was never very fond of metronomes, ever. They have always been, helpful though they may be, the bane of my existence. Right up there with raccoons and people who talk in movie theaters on my top list of hated things.

Originally Posted by KJ

I don't know if God lives in a temple or church
in a synagogue, cathedral or mosque.
In my heart I feel - God's existence is real
by His love for the child that is lost

Mortars rain down on village and town;
assault troops then even the score.
Not many survive - one or two are alive
those wee orphans - the children of war

Again and again brave men
gather up those who remain;
taking them to the rear away from the fear
from the death, the suffering, the pain

From a bombed out shack, it's door burned black,
came a wailing, a loud crying sound
by a wall made of sod was a wee child of God
a miracle baby was found.

In the midst of the smoke, tough peacekeepers joke
whilst holding back tears, rage and fear.
And in the canteen, those things they have seen
are flashed back o'er pitchers of beer.

I can't say if God lives in a temple or church
in a synagogue, cathedral or mosque, but
He lives in the foxhole, the bunker, the trench
Good Shepherd to the child that is lost.

©Copyright 2002 by Billy Willbond

I really like that one ^^^

God, give us men!

GOD, give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands; Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog In public duty, and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps.
Josiah Gilbert Holland

Posts 25 to 37 - all very good.

And I see we have some.... "o r i g i n a l t a l e n t" *said in Homer Simpson tone*

Keep em coming.....Am I the only one who eats pop-corn when reading other's poetry.












DISCLAIMER: Yes I have a life.

Originally Posted by Padre

DISCLAIMER: Yes I have a life.

Void under military quotes.

I always got a kick out of Robert Frost's Starsplitter. He's always been my favorite modern poet.

You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a life-long curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
"What do you want with one of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"
"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me."
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
And he could wait--we'd see to him to-morrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one's gift for Christmas,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn't sentient; the house
Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?
Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,
Was setting out up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night to-night
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?