Uncle Mike's Favorites
Collections of Short Poems
Collection #3
Cellphone Poetry Series II
Compiled by
Michael P. Garofalo
"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit."
- T. S. Eliot
'Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
- Alexander pope
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost
"Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble."
- Shakespeare
"Do not stand at my grave and weep:
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starshine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry:
I am not there; I did not die."
- Mary Elizabeth Frye
"Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out
from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving
stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward
by thee into ever-widening
thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father, let my country awake."
- Rabindranath Tagore
"Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be."
- Sara Teasdale
"Whisk me away to the mountainside.
Spirit me far to the glen.
For I long to find that secret place
Where I can begin again.
All of us long at least once in our lives
To flee from all that is known.
But most of us die with this wish on our lips,
Meeting each change with a groan.
Yet I would die young if it meant that this place
Should to me be granted or shown;
And if I, by some fate, must relinquish the rest,
Then I’ll travel that pathway alone.
Throw me to tumult from order and peace.
Unroot me right down to my core.
For in that place I’ll rebuild once again
Until I can do so no more."
- Talbot Hook
"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night"
- William Blake
"The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen."
- D. H. Lawrence
"You still shall live,
such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes,
even in the mouths of men."
- Shakespeare
"Lightning shatters the darkness—
the night heron's shriek."
- Matsuo Basho
"Does my soul abide in heaven, or hell?
Only the sea gulls in their high,
lonely circuits may tell."
- Glaucus
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
- Dylan Thomas
"One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away;
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise
“Not so.” quod I, “Let baser thing devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize
And in the heavens write your glorious name,
Where, when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”
- Edmund Spencer
"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few."
- Emily Dickinson
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself."
- Philip Larkin
"In the spring I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever, clear-eyed daisies
Always knew.
Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows."
- Sara Teasdale
The summer grasses.
All that remains
Of warriors’ dreams.
- Matsuo Basho
"When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you shall lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now."
- Sara Teasdale
"The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes
From the black shapeless accidents of size—
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death"
- e.e.cummings
Oh, tranquility!
Penetrating the very rock,
A cicada’s voice.
- Matsuo Basho
"Earth's winter cometh
And I being part of all
And sith the spirit of all moveth in me
I must needs bear earth's winter
Drawn cold and grey with hours
And joying in a momentary sun,
Lo I am withered with waiting
till my spring cometh!
Or crouch covetous of warmth
O'er scant-logged ingle blaze,
Must take cramped joy
in tomed Longinus
That, read I him first time
The woods agleam with summer
Or mid desirous winds of spring,
Had set me singing spheres
Or made heart to wander forth
among warm roses
Or curl in grass next neath
a kindly moon."
- Ezra Pound
"Your book, for me, is a touchstone;
For others, a thin broth of old bone
And nettles to be taken only
In dire need, or when lonely
Enough that reading again has some charm.
Your life, for some, is a beacon
Which stands against that which would weaken
Our strength and native capacity
For solitude and audacity,
And atrophies the reach of our arm.
Your project, for others, rings fake
(No matter how well you write of a lake).
When rustic going got tough,
You simply packed up all your stuff
And left to avoid buying the farm.
Now sitting, my feet in your pond,
A realization’s finally dawned:
Some things are easy to overrate,
And easier yet to groundlessly hate
Yet hardest of all to appreciate
By gathering a thing’s honest weight."
- Talbot Hook
"The looming specter of inflated fears
Assaults my soul and tries to crack my head.
Who says that in, at most, a few more years
Our planet’s denizens will all be dead?
The politicians on the Hill, that’s who,
The ones who’ve never worked an honest day,
So what’s a model citizen to do
Besides pack up his tent and walk away?"
- C. B. Anderson
"There is a quiet place
Where we can go to hide.
A place where no one sees us,
That cannot be denied.
There is a quiet place
Where we can go to think.
A place to solve our problems
And get our life in sync.
There is a quiet place
Where we can go to dream.
A place to play around in,
A place to let off steam.
There is a quiet place
Where we can go to pray.
Any time we want to
And as long as we may stay.
Where is that quiet place
That we all hope to find?
It is closer than you think.
I call it peace of mind."
- Roy E. Peterson
"I have spread wet linen
On lavender bushes,
I have swept rose petals
From a garden walk.
I have labeled jars of raspberry jam,
I have baked a sunshine cake;
I have embroidered a yellow duck
On a small blue frock.
I have polished andirons,
Dusted the highboy,
Cut sweet peas for a black bowl,
Wound the tall clock,
Pleated a lace ruffle
To-day
I have lived a poem.
I have spread wet linen
On lavender bushes,
I have swept rose petals
From a garden walk.
I have labeled jars of raspberry jam,
I have baked a sunshine cake;
I have embroidered a yellow duck
On a small blue frock.
I have polished andirons,
Dusted the highboy,
Cut sweet peas for a black bowl,
Wound the tall clock,
Pleated a lace ruffle . . .
To-day
I have lived a poem."
- Ethel Romig Fuller
"Where the young river broke over stones
we stood captive to the small dun bird bobbing
and trilling, chanting, surging song inside
the booming bell where it gripped
a water hump sliding over a boulder
in a sheen, then peering under, splitting
the flow to know below the shine
what caddis crawled. It dipped
and sang, we stood statue, arrested
by the wild water song feathered in gray,
and I felt—enough, that’s enough this life
has been, coming to this.
But walking on along the frosted path
the wan sun made shine, I felt the old
greed come back—to feel more, to see
and savor more before I slip under
the lip of the visible to fly dark
waters into origin."
- Kim Stafford
"If men desire to find belief, to sing
It out through throats works best to make the soul
Embrace it. This will make the sought faith zing
Behind their hearts and manliness’s whole.
The faith will throb straight through the tenor throats,
The baritones and basses’ tongues, and play
Up in the tear ducts through the holy notes,
The notes made sacred by the ricochet
Of music through the body and the brain.
The holiness will well up from the lungs
And wash, as in a holy rite, each stain
Of unbelief away with concord’s tongues.
The counter tenors chime in, too, above
Conviction like a Pentecostal dove."
- Philip Whidden
"They are rattling breakfast plates
in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs."
- T. S. Eliot
The rains of summer join together.
How swift it is
Mogami River.
- Matsuo Basho
"Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden
towards sundown,
Suspended in time,
between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest,
with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice,
on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that
is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness
in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than
blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind,
but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year.
Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers.
There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing.
This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant.
Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour
with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer,
neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer,
the unimaginable Zero summer?"
- T. S. Eliot
"O weeping woman veiled in green
What secrets hide beneath your shroud
That fall as tears into the stream
O’er which your verdant head is bowed?
These tears, are they for seedling sons
Long scattered by impartial breeze
Or are they for the lucky ones
Whose roots are sunken overseas?
Or do you weep for times long gone
Of greener leaf and bluer sky
Before your grief was written on
By prying poets such as I?
O ancient mother, though you weep
Your secrets are but yours to keep."
- Shannon Lodoen
"The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life."
- Derek Walcott
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
- William Ernest Henly
"Over the rounded sides of the Rockies,
The aspens of autumn,
Like yellow hair of a tigress brindled with pins.
Down on my hearth-rug of desert, sage of the mesa,
An ash-grey pelt
Of wolf all hairy and level, a wolf's wild pelt.
Trot-trot to the mottled foot-hills,
cedar-mottled and piñon;
Did you ever see an otter?
Silvery-sided, fish-fanged,
fierce-faced whiskered, mottled.
When I trot my little pony through
the aspen-trees of the canyon,
Behold me trotting at ease betwixt
the slopes of the golden
Great and glistening-feathered legs
of the hawk of Horus;
The Golden Hawk of Horus
Astride above me.
But under the pines
I go slowly
As under the hairy belly of a great black bear.
Glad to emerge and look back
On the yellow, pointed aspen-trees
laid one on another like Feathers,
Feather over feather on the breast
of the Great and Golden
Hawk as I say of Horus."
- D. H. Lawrence
"Live long enough,
and the losses pile up,
Till you're tossed away
like an old cracked cup,
All stained and worm,
dulled by time,
Useless, leaking,
not worth a dime.
Then, you die, sometime.
Egoless, your flesh falls away,
You, a skeleton becomes;
Lost in Nirvana,
lights out,
all done.
Nine months later—
to your utter surprise,
you awaken in bed,
Changed, very much alive.
Not as Kafka's Ungeheueres
Ungeziefer,
or as Casper the Ghost
covered in fur;
Not as a Memaloose on the Run,
but as a horny Stud Skeleton.
Then, the Skeleton Woman
drinks your dry tears,
Drums your still heart,
and sings away fears,
Slips under the quilts
and gives Love a Whirl;
Spinning, twirling,
your reborn as a Girl.
Forget yourself,
crack the cup on the floor,
Speak in a new voice,
the past is no more."
- Michael P. Garofalo
"so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens"
- William Carlos Williams
The old pond
A frog leaps in.
Sound of the water.
- Matsuo Basho
"From brick to marble, the walls will be converted,
Seven and fifty peaceful years:
Joy to mankind, the aqueduct renewed,
Health, abundant fruits, joy and honey-making times."
- Nostradamus
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
- Matsuo Basho
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind."
- T. S. Eliot
"It's all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell."
- Emily Dickinson
"Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now
described by waves of sand, by water-worn
rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then
humans will come ashore and paint dreams
on the dying stone. Then later, much later,
the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy
trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants,
who are going to the store."
- Joy Harjo
Short Poems by Michael P. Garofalo
Haiku, Brief Free Verse, Photos
Tercets, Concrete Poems, Quartets
Cinquains, Waka, Couplets, Senryu
Sonnets, Limericks, Quatrains
Under 30 Letters Best Per Line of Text
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series I
"Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.
There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled,
And never one fared back to me or spoke.
Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when
sick men's sighs are drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering Wing which none unbinds,
I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained."
- Wilfred Owen
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us,
coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain;
we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight,
into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee,
and talked for an hour."
- T. S. Eliot
"Butterfly, the wind blows sea-ward,
strong beyond the garden-wall!
Butterfly, why do you settle on my
shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe,
Lifting your veined wings, lifting them?
big white butterfly!
Already it is October, and the wind
blows strong to the sea
from the hills where snow must have
fallen, the wind is polished with snow.
Here in the garden, with red
geraniums, it is warm, it is warm
but the wind blows strong to sea-ward,
white butterfly, content on my shoe!
Will you go,
will you go from my warm house?
Will you climb on your big soft wings,
black-dotted,
as up an invisible rainbow, an arch
till the wind slides you sheer from the
arch-crest
and in a strange level fluttering you go
out to sea-ward, white speck!"
- D. H. Lawrence
A monk sips morning tea,
it's quiet,
the chrysanthemum's flowering.
- Matsuo Basho
"My Mama moved among the days
like a dreamwalker in a field;
seemed like what she touched was hers
seemed like what touched her couldn’t hold,
she got us almost through the high grass
then seemed like she turned around and ran
right back in
right back on in"
- Lucille Clifton
Awake at night—
the sound of the water jar
cracking in the cold.
- Matsuo Basho
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
- W. H. Auden
"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
- Wallace Stevens
"I went out at night alone;
The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—
I bore my sorrow heavily.
But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago.
From windows in my father’s house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another city’s lights.
Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars."
- Sara Teasdale
Cuttings: Haiku and Short Poems
Pulling Onions: Over 1,000 One-Liners
Green Way Research Subject Index
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series #10
Text, graphics, photos, and webpage design
by Michael P. Garofalo.
Updated: June 28, 2022
© Green Way Research
All Rights Reserved