i don't know if ive posted it but - this is my favorite poem ever!!
Candles
They are the last romantics, these candles: Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers, And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes, Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints. It is touching, the way they'll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds, And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all. Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing. They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon. This is no time for the private point of view. When I light them, my nostrils prickle. Their pale, tentative yellows
Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments, And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna. As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef. The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white. And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,
Imagining himself a headwaiter in America, Floating in a high-church hush Among ice buckets, frosty napkins. These little globes of light are sweet as pears. Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,
They mollify the bald moon. Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry. The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open. In twenty years I shall be retrograde As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls. How shall I tell anything at all To this infant still in a birth-drowse? Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her, The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.
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"Vanish like a lipstick trace
It always blows me away
They are the last romantics, these candles: Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers, And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes, Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints. It is touching, the way they'll ignore
Thats my favorite verse - its memorised nwo because i read it to many times
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"Vanish like a lipstick trace
It always blows me away
Thou Black, wherein all colours are compos'd, And unto which they all at last return, Thou colour of the Sun where it doth burn, And shadow, where it cools, in thee is clos'd Whatever nature can, or hath dispos'd In any other here : from thee do rise Those tempers and complexions, which disclos'd, As parts of thee, do work as mysteries, Of that thy hidden power, when thou dost reign The characters of fate shine in the Skies, And tell us what the Heavens do ordain, But when Earth's common light shines to our eyes, Thou so retir'st thy self, that thy disdain All revelation unto Man denys.
by Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury
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I am the person with pain in his eyes, I am the person you never saw cry.