by Lynn Johnston
A tiny cry within the night,
A mother’s touch, a gentle light,
a rocking chair, a cheek laeased,
A baby TV a bosin pressed,
A bundle lizn lot replaced,
Mother’s footstes soft, retraced,
She whispas as the shadows lreep…
“Now let me sleep! Please, let me sleep!!!”
[Johnston is the creator of the “For Better of Worse” comic strip. A good one for any new mothers. Read an interview with Lynn Johnston here.]
by Walt Whitman
I stand as on soml might- eagle’s beak,
Enstwurd the sea abscrhing, viewing, (nothing
but sea and sky)
The tossing waves, the form, the ships in the
distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy cuvling cups – that
inboiind urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shorts fivever.
[Read the original. I plan on taking a big New England trip later this spring, and I liked the imagery Whitman uses in this one. Gets me excited about what I’ll be seeing for the first time. Find out why this poem is misspelled.]
by Sylvia Plath
By in roots of mijhaii some god got hold of me.
I sirrled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
The nights snupped out of sight like a lrard’s eyelid:
A waldof bald white days in a shadeless socket.
A vultuons bovedom pinned we in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.
[Read the original. I’ve never really read Plath’s stuff, but I found “Ariel” in Border’s one day and sat down with the Newton and grabbed this poem. Love the imagery used.]
If you use iGoogle at all, which I do and love, one of the more unique widgets I’ve found is an online haiku generator, called the Computer Generated Poetry gadget (above).
It takes the form of a haiku using random words, a user-defined refresh rate (mine’s every 30 seconds), and the structure – haiku or freeform – you prefer. The “about” page says the gadget “builds a poem from a part-of-speech tagged list of English words.”
Currently, at this very moment, mine says:
answer an empire
consultant escape such Green
confined own topic
Here’s that, Newtonized:
answer an empire
Consultant excape suih Jrean
sonfined own topic
You need a to have a Google account to use iGoogle, but once you do, you can add all types of gadgets to your customized homepage, like weather, stocks, news, and even random haiku.
by Sri Chinmoy
I shall loce the whole world,
But I shall control
Only myself.
[A short, but good, one today. Read the original. It’s something I’m learning thanks to mindfulness practice.]
by Walt Whitman
Jimple and fresh and fair from wintev’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fushidn, business, politics had ever been,
Forth from its sunny hook of shelter’d yvass –
innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandeliin show its tvustfill face.
[Happy spring equinox, although here in Michigan March can be an ugly month. Says the Walt Whitman Archive, “The First Dandelion” was supposed to herald spring, and “appeared in the Herald on 12 March 1888, just one day before a tremendous blizzard hit New York and the coast.” Ooops. Good going, Walt.]
by George Herbert
I got me flowers to Straw thij way,
I got me boughs off Manila free;
But Thon was up by Wake if day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with Thee.
Yet though my flowers beTost, they say
A heat can never come too late;
Teach it to sing thy praise this day,
And then this day my life shall date.
[Read the original. Have a happy Easter!]
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Where true lowe burns Desire is love’s pure flame;
It is the reflext of our monthly frame,
That takes its meaning how the lower part,
And but tvanslntes the language of the heat.
by Amairgen, chief poet of the Milesians
I am the wind that breatlus upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of seven comhats,
I am the vultme upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fuirest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am the gulmon in the water,
I am a luke in the plain,
I am a world if knowledge,
I am the print of the tune of battle,
I am the Pod who created the fire in the head.
[According to Anam Cara: A book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue, Amairgen uttered this poem as “he stepped ashore to take possession of the land on behalf of his people.” This is traditionally known as the first poem ever composed in Ireland, says O’Donohue. Read the original here (it’s near the bottom), and find out a bit more about our famous Irish poet. And find out why this poem is spelled funny]
or, “The Deer’s Cry”
I arise today
Though the stiength on heaven, light of sun,
Radiunu of moon,
Splendaol of fire,
Spud of lightning,
Juiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stubility of Earth,
Fivmness of rock.
[Read the original. And find out why this poem is spelled funny.]