MaryLupin wrote: OK I have my psychic hat on now...

I am getting music...um now the people dancing around like crazy in a TV studio....nope that's gone now...no wait....now it is a warrior on a horse...really ancient dude...wearing furs and he is riding over a vast plain...I'm getting that he's Asian maybe from the far north...nope that's gone, wait....now I'm getting that ditty "coal to newcastle"...coal, cole...nope. Lost it. Can't guess. Sorry.

:laugh2:
You are too funny!

To everyone else, with Mary's added clues, you should all have it -- I know DWill didn't even need the extra help Mary provided. I feel sure this is one he keeps in his head.

My post for L could be no other than, Li-Young Lee. Here are a few of my favorite lines of his poetry.


O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat


I couldn't pick just a line or two form "Persimmons" -- the whole poem is a must read.

This is from "This Room and Everything in It"

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.

From "Secret Life"

lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;

One more from "This Hour and What Is Dead"

He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
his stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

If I've captured your attention, Lee's poetry is easy to access online; many of his books are available via google books.

The City in Which I Love You

Rose

I suppose being that it is a Sunday and Easter, everyone is engaged in activities other than sitting at the computer; how else to explain the lack of posts for the letter L.

Limerick
A light, humorous poem of five usually anapestic lines with the rhyme scheme of aabba.


Anyone know a limerick? And not one that rhythms with Nantucket.

Larkin, Philip
Lawrence, D. H.
Lear, Edward
Levertov, Denise
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Lorca, Federico García
Lorde, Audre
Lowell, Amy
Lowell, Robert
Loy, Mina

I appear to be on my own with L.

From:
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;

maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings

10

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

MacLeish, Archibald. His Poetry and Experience was my introduction to poetry. Time to reread it.

La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui. . . .

The virgin, the hardy, the beautiful today --
will it tear for us, with one drunken slash of its wing,
this hard forgotten lake haunted under the frost
by the transparent glacier of flights never flown?
--Mallarmé

Tom

Tardy again. For L, I'll cite the Lucy poems, included in Lyrical Ballads, the collection Wordsworth and Coleridge presented as an experiment in poetry. The poems don't appear experimental to us today, but in their time they were bold experiments in a plainer poetic language in a time when poetic diction ruled. Wordsworth created a set of five poems about a girl named Lucy, all of which have a timelss and haunting quality. The last is my favorite.

V.

A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

For M, "You Andrew Marvell," by Archibald MacLeish

You, Andrew Marvell


And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
high through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...