More poetry

I don't know or like enough poetry to devote a post every day in April to the subject, but I want to share just a few more of my favorite verses.

Here is my favorite limerick (I don't know the author):

There once was a [person] from [place]
Whose [body part] was [special case].
When [event] would occur,
It would cause [him or her]
To violate [law of time/space].

Here is my favorite haiku. It's by Kobayashi Issa, an 18th/19th century Japanese poet; it doesn't follow the familiar 5 - 7 - 5 syllable pattern because it's translated from Japanese:

Napped half the day;
no one
punished me.

My second-favorite haiku was written by Sean's childhood friend Corey for a school poetry assignment:

Haiku is stupid
Limits expression greatly
What a waste of time

Here's my favorite poem of all time, the very famous "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats. Even if you've never read it before, its lines have been stolen and repurposed so many times that it's impossible not to resonate with you:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?