Favorite poem meme

[womzilla]

I am, by my own description, mostly poetry-blind. I can't read verse for more than ten or twenty lines without my attention wandering; my brain overemphasizes the line breaks, or something, and I just run off the rail. I can get around this by listening to poems, especially when sung, but broadly the pleasures of poetry are not mine.

Still, there are some that even I can see the virtue in. The fifth stanza of William Blake's best-known poem, for instance, which packs an entire theodicy into four lines:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Or the conclusion of Roger Waters's "Watching TV":

And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She's different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar half victim
She's a victor star conceptually new

And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankanbono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free

Because she died on T.V.

And I grieve for my sister.

But for today, I'm going with "Eden", by Natalie Merchant:

We are the roses in the garden, beauty with thorns among our leaves.
To pick a rose you ask your hands to bleed.
What is the reason for having roses when your blood is shed carelessly?
It must be for something more than vanity.

Believe me, the truth is we're not honest, not the people that we dream.
We're not as close as we could be.
Willing to grow but rains are shallow.
Barren and wind-scattered seed on stone and dry land, we will be.
Waiting for the light arisen to flood inside the prison.
And in that time kind words alone will teach us, no bitterness will reach us.
Reason will be guided another way.
All in time.

But the clock is another demon that devours our time in Eden, in our Paradise.
Will our eyes see well beneath us, flowers all divine?
Is there still time?
If we wake and discover in life a precious love, will that waking become more heavenly?