Uncle Mike's Favorites
Collections of Short Poems
Collection #1
Cellphone Poetry Series II
Compiled by
Michael P. Garofalo
"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency."
- Emily Dickinson
"I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together."
-
Ogden Nash
"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow."
- Langston Hughes
"There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may
The poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!"
- Emily Dickinson
"so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens"
- William Carlos Williams
"Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk
One paints the beginning
of a certain end.
The other, the end of a
sure beginning."
- Maya Angelou
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard of no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
but signifying nothing.”
- Shakespeare
"I take my dreams and make of them a bronze vase
and a round fountain with a beautiful statue in its center.|
And a song with a broken heart and I ask you:
Do you understand my dreams?
Sometimes you say you do,
And sometimes you say you don’t.
Either way it doesn’t matter
I continue to dream."
- Langston Hughes
"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay."
- Robert Frost
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
- e.e.cummings
"The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree.
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And save some part
Of a day I had rued."
- Robert Frost
"To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up."
- Ogden Nash
"Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world."
- Langston Hughes
"All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above—
Know that you aren't alone
The whole world
shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years."
- Vikram Seth
"I do not like them in a box
I do not like them with a fox
I do not like them in a house
I do not like them with a mouse
I do not like them here or there
I do not like them anywhere
I do not like green eggs and ham
I do not like them Sam I am"
- Dr. Seuss
"I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree."
- Joyce Kilmer
"I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold"
- William Carlos Williams
"By this wall that surrounds the three Qin districts,
Through a mist that makes five rivers one,
We bid each other a sad farewell,
We two officials going opposite ways.
And yet, while China holds our friendship,
And heaven remains our neighborhood,
Why should you linger at the fork of the road,
Wiping your eyes like a heart-broken child?"
- Wang Bo
"No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know
For whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."
- John Donne
"TV is Deceiving
On episodes of sit-coms
(But few are funny),
Or on news with political scenes,
Or
on ads on buying things
Or on shows on alien beings.
These are hardly strange
With colors and graphics galore
And narrators
so melodious.
People are going to Dream
Of fake heroes and heroines,
No matter how odious.
Somewhere, a tired older man,
Stoned and asleep in his shorts,
Dreams of tortillas and tomatillos,
Eating in foggy ports,
Catching flies with chopsticks,
Reading Wallace Stevens' Quartz."
- Michael Garofalo
"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
- Robert Frost
"The dead of February, and everything sexual.
So sexual the icicles skirting the barn.
Sexual the animals huddled inside, shivering.
Sexual the cloud disappearing, appearing again,
from your half-open mouth. The moon
swollen bright. Sexual the trees, stark
naked, all their branches spread and undulating
in the wind. Sexual the tundra. Sexual
the blackest snow by the road, made blacker
by the city worker’s plow. Sexual, the snowman
leaning in a midnight yard. So sexual
dead February, the small town windows lit
from inside, fogging, watching you burn."
- John Murillo
"nothing will keep
us young you know
not young men or
women who spin
their youth on
cool playing sounds.
we are what we
are what we never
think we are.
no more wild geo
graphies of the
flesh. echoes. that
we move in tune
to slower smells.
it is a hard thing
to admit that
sometimes after midnight
i am tired
of it all."
- Sonia Sanchez
"Before our body existed,
One energy was already there.
Like jade, more lustrous as it's polished
Like gold, brighter as it's refined,
Sweep clear the ocean of birth and death,
Stay firm by the door of total mastery,
A particle at the point of open awareness,
The gentle firing is warm."
- Sun Bu'er
"To study the buddha way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas.
To be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas is to free
one's body and mind and those of others.
No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless
enlightenment is continued forever."
- Dogen
“pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
—electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born—pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if—listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go.”
- e. e. cummings
"Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality."
- Emily Dickinson
"There was a young belle of old Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comments arose
On the state of her clothes,
She replied, "When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez."
- Ogden Nash
"Death
Enter and exit
Of the tavern.
Black horses pass by
And sinister people
By the deep roads
Of the guitar.
And there is a smell of salt
And to female blood,
In the feverish nardos
of the Marine.
Death
Enters and leaves,
And goes out and enters
The death of the tavern."
- Frederico Garcia Lorca
"Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock;
the clock struck one
and down he run;
hickory dickory dock."
- Mother Goose
"We mourn the broken things,
chair legs wrenched from their seats,
chipped plates, the threadbare clothes.
We work the magic of glue,
drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans,
keep neck bones for soup.
Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars,
spreading across the yard.
Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms,
drive the bugs out.
My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All-day we watch
for the mail,
some news from a distant place."
- Natasha Tretheway
"To greet I offer and to celebrate I make myself
Your triumph, Love, to the kiss of the season that arrives
While the white swan of the blue lake sails
In the magical park of my witness triumphs.
Love, your golden sickle has reaped my wheat;
For you I am flattered by the soft sound of the Greek flute,
And for you Venus lavish his apples he gives me
And he gives me the pearls of fig honeys.
In the erect term I place a crown
In which of fresh roses the purple detonates;
And while the water sings under the dark wood,
Next to the teenager who in the mystery
I will hasten, alternating with your sweet exercise,
The golden amphoras of the divine Epicurus."
- Ruben Dario
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 is Best per Line of Text
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series I
“There was a young lady named Bright
who traveled much faster than light.
She set out one day
in a relative way,
and came back the previous night.”
- Arthur Buller
“Einstein, the frizzy-haired,
said E equals MC squared.
Thus all mass decreases
as activity ceases?
Not my mass, my ass declared!”
- Michael Burch
"A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue."
- Ogden Nash
“Hawking, who makes my head spin,
says time may flow backward. I grin,
imagining the surprise
in my mother's eyes
when I head for the womb once again!”
- Michael Burch
"I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."
- Wallace Stevens
"The sun beyond the mountains glows;
The Yellow River seawards flows.
You can enjoy a grander sight.
By climbing to a greater height.
- Wang Zhihuan
Uncle Mike's Favorite Short Poems
Cuttings: Haiku and Short Poems
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"A touch of cold in the Autumn night,
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
- T. E. Hulme
"Farmers weeding at noon,
Sweat down the field soon.
Who knows food on a tray
Thanks to their toiling day?
- Li Shen
"Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?"
- Robert Hayden
"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life
and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives
with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.
- Wendell Berry
Pulling Onions: Over 1,000 One-Liners
Cuttings: Haiku and Short Poems
Green Way Research Subject Index
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series #8
Text, graphics, photos, and webpage design
by Michael P. Garofalo.
Updated: July 7, 2022
© Green Way Research
All Rights Reserved