Poetry

I was just sitting here trying to find some inspirational quotes for someone, and Peter says 'what are you doing on there?' to which I replied in great length what I was doing, along with a couple of quotes, yada yada. He tuned out, obviously, and when I'd finished he said 'Forget about your poetry and prose, here are my feet, tickle my toes' and shoved his foot in my face. Nice.
As a lot of 17 year olds, I went through a phase of trying to find myself through poetry. This included songs like 'Take another little piece of my heart'- Janis Joplin, 'I got life' - Nina Simone, 'Believe' - Lenny Kravitz, this was the soundtrack of my teenage life (along with burning incense and an embarrassingly angsty diary or 5!) but I was also quite into real adult poetry that I had to go to the library and read through volume after volume of (mostly crap) poetry to find. So, I found W.B. Yeats and I printed on a dot matrix printer and glued it to a picture in a child's storybook I found at the church market

“A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.”

It's been YEARS since I stuck that into a frame and hung it on my cupboard, but I couldn't bring myself to empty the frame when I came across it recently.
Another Yeats,

When You are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars

.

Awww - that one reminds me of one of our wedding songs, and another more relevant quote to life nowadays

They say time takes its toll on a body
Makes a young girls brown hair turn gray
Honey i don't care i ain't in love with your hair
N if it all fell out well i'd love you anyway

That'd be Forever and Ever Amen by Randy Travis.


I also found Desiderata on a bookmark around those teenage years - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata
(I'm going to figure out how to link that nice and neatly later, you'll just have to google the song lyrics if you want to)
I related that poem to my life at the time so deeply that even today when I read it I think of certain people who were in my life then who were loud/aggressive and thus vexations to my spirit! And who I compared myself to here -

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

oh I just remember the jealousy of others more able, more beautiful, more funny, more skinny, more clever than I in my teenage years just like it was yesterday. I'm much more accepting these days :)