Gomer

Love is patient, love is kind,

I'll try to keep that all in mind,
If you'll hold your hand in mine.

Won't you hold my right hand,
give me the strength I need to stand?
Isn't that what you promised?

I've been broken, I've been bruised,

Nobody wants to love the used

Love is just another word, for let me hurt you

Will you be my salvation,

the loving arms that won't let me run?

Even though I don't always want it.

Will you persevere?
Break through my walls, and angers and fears
Will you persevere?

Put your hand in mine,
Love is patient, love is kind,

Or so I've been told

Faith, hope, and love these three remain,

won't you bring me home again?

Even though I'm prone to go, go, go, go, go–––?

Will you protect me from myself?

It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

-- Margaret Atwood (Published 1968)

A Poet

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

e.e. cummings (october 26 1955)