maggie and milly and molly and may by e.e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

The Facebook Sonnet by Sherman Alexie

Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let's undervalue and unmend

The present. Why can't we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let's exhume, resume and extend
Childhood. Let's all play the games

That preoccupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one's search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church.

Let's sign up, sign in and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.

Geography Lesson by Brian Patten

Our teacher told us one day he would leave
And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps,
And all his life had longed to be.

The house he lived in was narrow and grey
But in his mind's eye he could see
Sweet-scented jasmine clinging to the walls,
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.

He spoke of the lands he longed to visit,
Where it was never drab or cold.
I couldn't understand why he never left,
And shook off the school`s stranglehold.

Then halfway through his final term
He took ill and never returned.
He never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.

The maps were redrawn on the classroom wall;
His name forgotten, he faded away.
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day.

I travel to where the green leaves burn,
To where the ocean's glass-clear and blue,
To places our teacher taught me to love-
And which he never knew.

The Portrait of a Sentenced Library by Alfian Sa'at

So these bricks will be torn down
And books will still not have learnt
To spread their feathers and fly
Like pigeons from a shaken tree

So this balustrade will be dismantled
Perhaps reassembled somewhere else -
A conch paperweight by my head is a beach.
Each hour from a postcard Big Ben chimes.

This is the logic of nostalgia -
This is what I mean when I say
That my memory is selfish.
Who can guarantee that roaming

Through a tunnel I will find again
The Children's Section, where a boy walked
With 'the Little Prince' in his hands,
His smile the first line of a novel

Neither of us had read before?
One cymbal left in Chinatown.
Blueprints and forums and rhetoric ensure
That a firecracker makes no sound.

So the shattered glass of Van Kleef Aquarium
Still magnifies the eyelashes of students.
So the ragged screen of Capitol Cinema
Still shudders as a Pontianak drips black blood.

Only in dreams. Under separate stars.
I had one last night; of sitting at S-11
With the usual bunch of affectionate liars,
Skinny artists, red-eyed dreamers,

When suddenly a book appeared in the sky
Like a carrier pigeon that had escaped
From the ruins of the library.
It landed, without a murmur,

On my shoulder. I opened that book,
Expecting a cry for help, a refugee's plea.
What I found instead was this poem
That did not know how to end. Only when.

Only the Moon by Wong May

When I was a child I thought
The new moon was a cradle
The full moon was granny's round face

The new moon was a banana
The full moon was a big cake.

When I was a child
I never saw the moon.
I only saw what I wanted to see.

And now I see the moon
It's the moon,
Only the moon, and nothing but the moon.

Eulogy: Love is not a modulus sign

how will you measure love when it comes to town? you might like to weigh it up with coffee spoons, drinking each mouthful like water, like medicine, a spoonful of sugar. you might like to sit in a corner and mark the daylight that streams in through the window, mark how the sun moves across his face, his eyes. love is not a victory march. you cannot measure it by the number of flags won, you cannot measure it by the number of hearts lost. it cannot be measured by the decibels of sound, the number of chess moves made, the number of times peace has been made. love is not a war. it cannot be fought or won or lost. love is not a science experiment: there can be no trial runs and its hypotheses can never be tested. love is not a graph you can extrapolate forever from. love is not a maths question. there are neither correct nor wrong answers and it cannot be solved in three steps. there is no way to prove it and you cannot verify that one person will always satisfy the equation. there is no equation when 1 + 1 never equals 2.

but love is a great mathematician. love marks the area of a boy walking down clarke quay with you; the volume of his love is the amount of space he takes up. love is in the length of his fingers and the number of seconds his eyes take to trail down your legs. love knows the number of heartbeats you take when he walks past, love watches as your brain slows down and the rest of you goes into overdrive. love alone knows the length of the shadow he casts on your face while you sleep, love sees the width of that chasm that separates you from him. love remembers the number of steps you take away from him, and love knows that when one person is between two others, the hypotenuse of the triangle must always be √2 and hence an impossibility. love knows that the shortest distance from one person to another is not always a straight line, and that some people walk in circles only to find they have never moved from the same spot. and love knows that if you try to differentiate one from the other — there is no way you can integrate them back.

/from Supermango

Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

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 woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Death in the Family by Julie Hill Alger

They call it stroke.
Two we loved were stunned
by that same blow of cudgel
or axe to the brow.
Lost on the earth
they left our circle
broken.

One spent five months
falling from our grasp
mute, her grace, wit,
beauty erased.
Her green eyes gazed at us
as if asking, as if aware,
as if hers. One night
she slipped away;
machinery of mercy
brought her back
to die more slowly.
At long last
she escaped.

Our collie dog
fared better.
A lesser creature, she
had to spend only one day
drifting and reeling,
her brown eyes
beseeching. Then she
was tenderly lifted,
laid on a table,
praised, petted
and set free.

Missing by Alfian Sa'at

He go to school.
Never come back.
I make police report.
Newspaper, Crime Watch.
They even put his picture,
He and the other boy,
On poster, with reward
From fast-food restaurant.

I ask from the RC man:
Can I have it from the
Lift lobby noticeboard.
He give me and also say sorry.
I have it in my bedroom.
Every morning with half-
Open eyes I remind myself
My son: the one on the left.

Got calls come in once.
Say they saw him in
Penang, selling videos.
Or in Bangkok, begging.
Child prostitute they say.
Sometimes no voice at all.
Hello? Hello? Who is this?
I am your son. Then hang up.

So many things to remember.
His school is still there.
I walk to it sometimes;
Pretend I am him.
Praying come kidnap me
Take me away now.
Got one artist try to draw
My son's grown-up face.

I ask him draw one
For every year. He say cannot.
Got one time I was on TV.
Crying, with schoolbag on my lap.
Keep saying, good boy, always help me
Do housework. Now I say let me
Do the housework. Let me wake up
To the mess he left behind.