Curiosity

I enjoyed this poem so much because we hear this phrase so often in society. "Curiosity killed the cat" but it didn't. Curiosity didn't kill Albert Einstien or scientists, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers, or students, or anyone for that matter. It simply provided that life giving power to all people. "Dogs" in the poem live happy, usual, quiet yet short lives. While "cats" in the poem live for curiosity. They get nine lives because they spend each of them living their curiosities throughout. People not being curious about the next day they could live to see is what causes them to die. People who are not curious about the future have no interest in seeing it and therefore generally don't get to see it. What I didn't like about the poem was that at the end it says, "And what cats have to tell on each return from hell," because I don't feel that the cats should go to hell for being curious, for living a life they enjoy, for getting the most out of every life they live. I think this is completely and utterly unfair because although they may not lead the simple, happy lives of dogs, they don't murder or rape or destroy the world they live in. They are simply curious. Maybe the phrase should be "Curiosity damned the cats."

Questions About Pie

To me you may ask:
Why?
Why pie?
Why do you sigh
when you taste the sweetness of pie
and I may reply
Why?
Why oh, why?
Sincerly, I sigh
And ask myself why?
Why on earth are you still talking?!
I'm trying to eat me pie!!!

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of 
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all. 

I love this poem a lot. It really made me think of the innocence of childhood and how people can always find a meaning that others don't in some things. First, innocence of children seems to amaze adults which in turn amazes me because it seems like they find the secret to life in a simple line of poetry but we can't find the secret anywhere. It amazes me because I think that if adults looked simply at the little things in life like children do then they could find the secret, but I suppose when you grow up you lose that and that is why people cherish the innocence of children so much. Second,  I remember the first day of English this year and we read a poem about not beating the meaning out of poems because everyone is different and everyone interprets things in a different manner and in this poem I think it was a surprise to the author because as quickly as these girls had found meaning where she couldn't, they forgot and moved on to the next secret of life. I always feel a little biased when i listen to people talk in class about what they thought of a poem because I didn't think that at all, but then I remember that everyone has their own background and knowledge and everyone gets their own opinion. I liked the way this poem was written. Short and to the point, but still meaningful and filled with emotions of the author. Overall, a great poem. Probably one of my favorites so far. 

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

I liked this poem a lot because I think the first line sums up the real truth of life. We may come from different backgrounds, races, sexes, upbringings, and cultures, but all humans are the same. We live for the same necessities and we all share the same emotions. The author speaks of all the "lying days of my youth"  which I think means he didn't realize how much people were alike. He lied to himself saying that he knew the truth of the world and he showed everyone his leaf. His little piece of the pie and his little ray of sunlight, but he never knew that it didn't matter how much he showed off himself to the world because in the end we are all together as one united species. His leaves are withering into a truth because I think that now he was grown up and he is realizing that there is truth in the fact of the first line of the poem. It was strange how it was only one stanza, just four simple lines and yet they are four very impactful lines. They speak the truth about people and how we act when we are young and the way we may act as we get older. Which I think also ties into the first line that we are all naive as people when we are young and then as we get older we all realize the truth.I liked the poem less the more I read it. I don't really know why, but it just didn't catch my interest as much the more I read it.

A Work of Artiface

When I first read this poem the only thing going through my mind was the fifties. Women in the fifties were for show. They had no thoughts, no ideas, no place among men. They were to be seen and not heard. They lived to serve their husbands. Had they not lived in this manner perhaps they could have been doctors or lawyers or maybe one of them could have found the cure for cancer. "Could have grown eight feet tall on the side of a mountain" means that if they had been set free and let do as they wish they could have amounted to anything they wanted to. The men believed they were helping them and keeping them safe and happy just like the gardener thought he or she was doing for the plant. The gardener makes the plant seem lucky to get a pot to grow in just like men believed women to be lucky for them to have a home. They were lucky they had been chosen for marriage. The beginning young thing I didn't understand at first, but I think it means that this was driven into young men, young women and even children of the fifties. They were taught at a young age that men rule the house hold and women have babies and clean the house. The bound feet made me think of Chinese cultures because they use to break and bind the feet of little girls so that they would be small and delicate. After this last part of the poem it seems almost a mixture of Chinese culture and their treatment of women and the American culture in the fifties and the way society of that time viewed women. I really enjoyed this poem a lot because as a society most of us believe the fifties to be a time of prosperity and the rich social classes where everyone lived like a millionaire, but this poem shows how much destruction of self worth came through for women in this time. I really liked how right away I knew it wasn't about a tree. I knew it was about women and their roles in society. That was nice because I didn't have to beat the meaning out of it. I understood right away. Overall, I think this is one of my favorite poems.

In Blackwater Woods

 Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

 

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

 

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

 

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

 

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

 

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. 

I think this poem is about the authors adoptive family and her home in Ohio. When she talks about the fires and the black river of loss I think she may be talking about the tragedy that may have lead to her adoption. She keeps remembering it all the time and at the end she has to remind herself that in life when things are gone you have to let them go. Maybe she feels remorse because she didn't cherish her family when she had it. It just seems like in the beginning she is talking about heaven because it's the pillars of light like shining down from heaven and then she talks about the fragrance of cinnamon. I would assume heaven would smell good and I think cinnamon smells good. I think the fulfillment comes from the fact that maybe her parents are in heaven and they are safe and happy. I think the nameless ponds means that people lose their loved ones everyday and they are nameless to us but to the people who lost them it's a huge deal. I liked the way it went from just being pillars to pillars of light with the sweet fragrance. I typically don't like when the authors split up the sentences between stanzas but I don't mind it in this poem at all. I think it adds to the effect of the poem. Overall I really liked the poem a lot because it is partially about nature and it has a much deeper meaning than just how beautiful nature is. 

1943

This poem just shocked me a little at first. The first line " They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round of the heavy weight finals, and ten months later Dom dies in the third wave at Tarawa " was really crazy to me because it's like if we had lived in a time like this, all these boys we know around school would be gone in a flash. They wouldn't be the quarterback or the track star anymore, they would just be soldiers and instead of weight lifting in the gym they would be doing push ups and getting ready to carry a gun through harsh conditions. It was crazy how people at home often watched their normal lives continue and they forgot all the things that were happening to the young men across the world. I just got an email the other day about how people are beginning to realize that we have forgotten all these men and women go through and now people want to show they still appreciate these people and their selfless actions. I didn't understand the whole milk thing at first, but when everyone in class was talking about how it was a kind of child-like, nurturing sort of thing then I understood. These were young men who really had to grow up fast and they were still kids in reality. They had to lose their childhood too soon and the families at home grew up safe and sound and people there got to keep living their childhood and drinking their milk. I really liked the poem overall. Sometimes I just don't understand the way they split stanzas sometimes. For me it is just confusing and not that effective. It just makes me mad sometimes.

Penny For Your Thoughts by

Can I have a penny, for your thoughts?
As a matter of fact how about three
One penny for you
One penny for me
And one penny for our minds engaged
Not so sexually
Getting intimately closer
As we approach the climactic altitude
Of nude mental sensational conversation
cuz I’m trying to get to know everything about you
from the neck UP
So these are not your typical sexual poetical prose
I’m trying to close the door of an all too familiar freaky foreplay game
With which most people have chosen to approach you
While they’re trying to get deeply embedded in the fine fibers of your bed sheets
I’m trying to find and define the fibers with which your mind speaks
I want to engage you by putting a two carat solitaire diamond on your mind
and marrying your every thought
I want to lick every inch of every crevice so I can get an oral fix from each orifice
and taste your passionate imagination
I’d rather be naked and exposed holding you as we’re lying
And your crying while confiding and describing the tough times you had in life
And how you don’t know if you can keep a relationship
Long enough to be somebody’s wife
I want to feel the heartbeat of all your inner rhythms as they lead me towards your
warm wet waterfalls of feminine thoughts
And I’ll swim within ‘em from back strokes to breast strokes
I’m penetrating every entrance to your mind
Taking my time to find out everything about you
Did I ever tell you about how you fell asleep in my presence?
And your mere essence kept me up for hours
As I coward with this feel of a sexually unadulterated mental connection
And as you laid by my side I pushed my blinds aside
And took the time in the moonlight of that night
To county seventy-two eyelashes on the upper eyelid of your right eye
Because as you sleep
As you sleep they remain open slightly
And while we probably move too quickly into some sexual stuff
I’ve always cared more about the explicitly illicitness
that came from between your lips meaning your voice
so now I’m standing here ready to trade in all the sexual acts that we perform
for the chance to reform the very foundation and basis of our relationship
and I reiterate my opening statement
And I offer you another penny for your thoughts

My boyfriend showed me this poem because it's his favorite and now it's mine. I just think people- especially teens- get caught up in the who slept with who bologna and it's nice to know that there are people who actually want to look deeper than the sexually explicit material in the world around us. There is a saying " Sex Sells," and maybe it's true but you just have to keep buying more of it. It never lasts like really getting to know someone and who they are on the inside. I really thought it was very serendipitous that I would hear this poem and Christian had just written the creative writing paper about his first time. I think it is funny in the poem because it seems like you wait until the end to hear the horrible, dirty, graphic stuff and then he says something poetic and profound. I thought it was amazing because this poet really seems like he wants a change in his life and the way he views his relationships. I believe in true love and I believe that this poet has found true love and he really wants to savor all the amazing things about this girl he is with instead of pretending they are close by having sex.I think that so many people believe that sex is as close as you can be to someone, but I believe that knowing someone better than you know yourself and knowing without asking how that person feels is as close as you can get to them. " I want to engage you by putting a two carat solitaire diamond on your mind and marrying your every thought" is my favorite line because it's not like he's like " Well, let's run out and get married." It's more of a " I want to see everything you see and know all the things you are thinking about." I love this poem so much now. It's much better to watch the real poet preform it instead of just reading it. It's on YouTube :)

Mr. Fear

I really liked this poem. It was pretty typically in form. Six stanzas with four lines in each, but it was very impacting. I really like the part "Maybe he smiles when he finds the right one. Maybe he's sorry. Tell me, Mr. Fear, what must I carry" because it just really made me picture a man searching through a bag and without looking he knows what he's found and he smiles or maybe it's almost like he searched and searched through his bag like he didn't want to find the fear and when his hand reaches it he feels sympathy for what he has to put you through. It really shows how we feels as human beings. We may say that it is okay to fear, but we don't want a huge fear. We want a small one, maybe one we won't have to face everyday. Everyday we may be able to get over fears and so he " keeps track" and he must change what he carries in his sack. I thought it was strange in the part about the crickets because it's like when you hear something, but don't see it, it's not as scary. Perhaps you are just hearing things? Only when you see it in your dreams does it really become that fear. Only when you have to face it is it scariest of all. Over all I really thought the poem was cool. It's a cool view of how people have different fears and how they come to realize them.

To Myself

Well the first time I read this I was a little confused but I did notice that it is always "you" and "I" and never they or it. It's like talking to a friend. Sort of like, "I've missed you a lot and I haven't seen you in a while," type of tone. The second time I read it I felt sort of like it was W.S. Merwin saying he knew who he really was but he lost himself. To me, the first two lines "Even when I forget you, I go on looking for you." means that sometimes you lose the person you think you are and you forget the person you used to be, but you will never stop wanting to be that person. The next two, "I believe I would know you, I keep remembering you." I think mean that if that person you were before ever came back you'd know it was them in a heartbeat and you just keep thinking of that person. Everything you do in life makes you remember the person you were before. "Sometimes long ago but then, other times I am sure you, were here a moment before," makes me think that sometimes you can go back to that person you used to be and then they go away again so it seems like they were just there, but then it at other times it seems like it has been forever since you've known this person. "And the air is still alive, around where you were and I, think then I can recognize," this means that sometimes when that person does come back you feel alive again. You found what you were looking for and you think you know it is them. " You who are always the same, who pretends to be time but, you are not time and who speaks, in the words but you are not, what they say you who are not, lost when I do not find you." This to me means that you always see that person as the same. They never change because it is the person you want them to be. It almost seems like that person is only in the past, but they aren't. They are not a part of time, they are a part of you that can be there anytime and any place. The words part confused me a little at first but I think that it means that people may say you were a certain person, but you always make the choice of who you are. The lost part is probably my favorite part. Just because you haven't found that person again or for the first time doesn't mean that they aren't there. They are just waiting in the background. Overall, I really enjoyed the poem a lot. It was pretty interesting in my opinion.