Your Favorite Poems

[Nat]

The Darkling Thrush
BY THOMAS HARDY

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

[Nat]

Pledge to the Wind

by Everett Ruess, age 16

Onward from vast uncharted spaces,
Forward through timeless voids,
Into all of us surges and races
The measureless might of the wind.

Strongly sweeping from open plains,
Keen and pure from mountain heights,
Freshly blowing after rains,
It welds itself into our souls.

In the steep silence of thin blue air,
High on the lonely cliff-ledge,
Where the air has a clear, clean rarity,
I give to the wind my pledge:

"By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eye,
By the skill of my fingers, I swear,
As long as life dwells in roe, never will I
Follow any way, but the sweeping way of the wind.

I will feel the wind's buoyancy until I die;
I will work with the wind's exhilaration;
I will search for its purity; and never will I
Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind."

Here in the utter stillness,
High on the lonely cliff-ledge,
Where the air is trembling with lightning,
I have given the wind my pledge.

[Glenn]

I wrote this little poem myself when I was a kid-

Love is playful as a kitten
tender when it's touched,
but the more you play
the rougher it gets, so don't you play too much!
You'll love the way it purrs and mews
as it cuddles close to you,
you'll love the way it cheers you, whenever you feel blue.
But the more you play the rougher it gets,
there have claws that pick and tear,
their always hidden from your eyes, and they strike you unaware.