Memory Poems
I Am
by John Clare
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
......
The Poem Of Zuhair
by İbn Abî Sûlmâ Zuhayr
'Does the blackened ruin, situated in the stony ground between Durraj and Mutathallam, which did not speak to me, when addressed, belong to the abode of Ummi Awfa?
'And is it her dwelling at the two stony meadows, seeming as though they were the renewed tattoo marks in the sinews of the wrist?
'The wild cows and the white deer are wandering about there, one herd behind the other, while their young are springing up from every lying-down place.
'I stood again near it, (the encampment of the tribe of Awfa,) after an absence of twenty years, and with some efforts, I know her abode again after thinking awhile.
'I recognized the three stones blackened by fire at the place where the kettle used to be placed at night, and the trench round the encampment, which had not burst, like the source of a pool.
......
Exposure
by Wilfred Owen
I
1 Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...
2 Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
3 Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
4 Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
5 But nothing happens.
6 Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
7 Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
......
The Martyr Of Alabama
by Frances Ellen Wat Harper
"Tim Thompson, a little negro boy, was asked to dance for the amusement of some white toughs. He refused, saying he was a church member. One of the men knocked him down with a club and then danced upon his prostrate form. He then shot the boy in the hip. The boy is dead; his murderer is still at large." -- News Item.
He lifted up his pleading eyes,
And scanned each cruel face,
Where cold and brutal cowardice
Had left its evil trace.
It was when tender memories
Round Beth'lem's manger lay,
And mothers told their little ones
Of Jesu's natal day.
......
Under The Harvest Moon
by Carl Sandburg
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
......
Childhood Reveries
by Advik Saxena
In fields of gold beneath the summer sun,
Where laughter danced and time was never done,
We chased the butterflies in endless flight,
And dreams took wing on fleeting rays of light.
Through woods alive with whispers soft and kind,
Where secrets bloomed like flowers in the mind,
We built our castles in the morning dew,
And every wish we had, we found was true.
......
Was it Worth it
by Ella S
Starting something new
is a bit scary at first.
It's not the beginning that's hard,
but seeing it the whole way through.
Sometimes we make it to the end.
Sometimes we don't.
If we do make it through,
it makes us feel good.
A sense of joy when we look back
at what we accomplished.
......
Protocol 1 (After Walter Benjamin)
by Jessica Leininger
You tread the worn paths
Of oft recalled memories
Though now they appear
Strewn with roses.
Carefully you pick up a stem,
Wonder where the beauty came from.
Suddenly a prick;
......
The Effects of Memory
by Michael R. Burch
The Effects of Memory
by Michael R. Burch
A black ringlet curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight ...
This is what I remember
now that I cannot forget.
......
Landscape
by Stuart Payne
Find me a place where stories have grown old,
and wound about the lands where they were told
in other times so that they seem as one
with all that lies beneath a foreign sun,
like vines that grow on warm and weathered stones
or veins that stretch about their living bones.
Or lie to me and say this is that place
and in that story you and I will trace
the past that never was, so that this seems
......
