"Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes"

Thus sa NigelMolesworth, curse of St Custards. However, being more of a Fotherington-Thomas sort, I love the stuff. Hullo clouds, hullo sky! Following a request from DebbyM, I've been thinking about a good poem to post. Someone else jogged my memory of this one by the fantastic e e cummings, so here it is.

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

Here's my absolute favourite from him though: I have it stapled next to my whiteboard (not political correctness, the boards are actually white now) and when I have a stressful moment my eye can rest upon it and it gives me a lift. I can't get through reading it aloud without my voice breaking.especially the last line. The words are oblique, like most cummings, but you don't have to over-analyse it, let the words wash over you. Poetry should always be said outloud though. If we all have the temerity to sing along with music at our PCs (and we all do, right?), why not read them out. The sounds are everything.

somewhere i have never travelled
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens ; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands