Post your favorite poets and poems

As an avid lover of poetry. I enjoy buying books from great poets. Maybe your like me and cry when reading a tear jerker or laugh when you read a poem that is funny. These are just a few I enjoy to read. Please share.
Source
James Galvin
Post-Modernism

A pinup of Rita Hayworth was taped To the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom. Horses are wishes, especially dark ones. That's why twitches and fences. That's why switches and spurs. That's why the idiom of betrayal. They forgive us. Their windswayed manes and tails, Their eyes, Affront the winterscrubbed prairie With gentleness. They live in both worlds and forgive us. I'll give you a hint: the wind in fits and starts. Like schoolchildren when the teacher walks in, The aspens jostle for their places And fall still. A delirium of ridges breaks in a blue streak: A confusion of means Saved from annihilation By catastrophe. A horse gallops up to the gate and stops. The rider dismounts. Do I know him?

juana de ibarbourou Source
Running Water

This water that comes through the dark nerves of piping, to give its pure freshness to my house and the gift of cleanliness every day. This bubbling water that the faucet bestows, this swelling of deep mystery from the river bed, the wind and grass. I view with envious impatience this traveling wave that is my sister, that has come to the big city from some distant unknown meadow. And halted before this open faucet sprinkling my apron with beads, I feel upon me the loving look of a thousand clear eyes of water.

Amy Clampitt Source
The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews

An ingenuity too astonishing to be quite fortuitous is this bog full of sundews, sphagnum- lines and shaped like a teacup. A step down and you're into it; a wilderness swallows you up: ankle-, then knee-, then midriff- to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted understory, an overhead spruce-tamarack horizon hinting you'll never get out of here. But the sun among the sundews, down there, is so bright, an underfoot webwork of carnivorous rubies, a star-swarm thick as the gnats they're set to catch, delectable double-faced cockleburs, each hair-tip a sticky mirror afire with sunlight, a million of them and again a million, each mirror a trap set to unhand believing, that either a First Cause said once, "Let there be sundews," and there were, or they've made their way here unaided other than by that backhand, round- about refusal to assume responsibility known as Natural Selection. But the sun underfoot is so dazzling down there among the sundews, there is so much light in that cup that, looking, you start to fall upward.

Source
Lyonnesse

No use whistling for Lyonnesse ! Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- There's where it sunk. The blue, green, Gray, indeterminate gilt Sea of his eyes washing over it And a round bubble Popping upward from the mouths of bells People and cows. The Lyonians had always thought Heaven would be something else, But with the same faces, The same places... It was not a shock- The clear, green, quite breathable atmosphere, Cold grits underfoot, And the spidery water-dazzle on field and street. It never occurred that they had been forgot, That the big God Had lazily closed one eye and let them slip Over the English cliff and under so much history ! They did not see him smile, Turn, like an animal, In his cage of ether, his cage of stars. He'd had so many wars ! The white gape of his mind was the real Tabula Rasa.

Pablo Neruda

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You by Pablo Neruda I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly. Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray, stealing my key to true calm. In this part of the story I am the one who Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Source

Someone recently turned me onto David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?

William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
The stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company;
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth to me the show had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Here is a couple I wrote too:
A Perfect Moment
Alive With You

Peace,
spec

You are mortal in your body only,
for your soul lives on forever.
You are subject to the chains of fate,
that you cannot hope to sever.

You must create the destiny,
that determines your special fate.
By all you say and do,
by the decisions that you make.
,

You can invent your future,
simply decide just what you want.
Work hard to reach those goals,
or it will all be for naught.

Always trust your instincts,
they will seldon let you down.
Live within lifes rules,
for it's by these that you are bound.

If you think that life is easy,
you had better think again.
For life is like a battle,
that somehow you must win.

Author: John Bernard Robinson

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. "

I'm not much for poetry, but I really liked this one:

Dance of the Solids, by John Updike.
butane.chem.uiuc.edu...

I mean, the stuff that guy gets to rhyme...

THE CONQUEROR WORM.

————
BY EDGAR A. POE.
————

Lo! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years —
A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly —
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast shadowy things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama — oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forevermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued!

Out — out are the lights — out all!
And, over each dying form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the seraphs, all haggard and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy "Man,"
Its hero the Conqueror Worm.

source

-B.M

If we're counting epic poems then it's Paradise Lost. If not, then it's "And did those feet in ancient time" by William Blake.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land