Welcome to our Fourth Annual Poetry Contest, now with comment-section goodness! For those of you who have never participated, the contest goes like this; interested parties may submit a poem, either in the body of a comment or an LJ reply or as a link to the poem on a different site. If your poem gets picked, you will be credited as a winner under whatever name you submitted, and the Bunnies will re-enact your poem for you! There will be a total of five poetry updates – four contest winners, and one Artist’s Choice. You can enter as many times as you like, although you may only win once per contest. There are only four guidelines:
1) This poem must fit into a standard-sized Bunnies cartoon, so anyone who submits the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in for a disappointment.
2) If it’s in a foreign language, please submit a translation so that I (and everyone else) can figure out what’s going on.
3) YOU CANNOT SUBMIT YOUR OWN POETRY. The poet you choose does not have to be a Laureate, but they cannot be you. That’s why you have your own webpage or blog.
4) No song lyrics, please.
Other than that, go to town. I look forward to seeing what kind of poetry people pick out. Work made for the winners will start being posted on March 1st. Good luck, everybody!
Question: Can it be a portion of a larger poem? Two to three stanzas that stand alone? Or does it need to be complete?
Normally I go for complete poems, but now I’m curious what you’ve found that can stand alone divided. What the hey, post it anyway – you can always enter additional poems in the same contest.
Here is my poem submission. I hope this is the right way to submit it. You wanted it as a comment for this comic right?
Thanks!
Flock
It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenburg Bible
required the skins of 300 sheep. (this part is in italics)
I can see them
squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed.
All of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible to count them.
And there is no telling which one of them
will carry the news
that the Lord is a Shepherd,
one of the few things
they already know.
- Billy Collins
Dear Aubrey,
Thanks again for you sick bunnies. I hope you like this one from rocket scientist and sex-magican Jack Parsons:
I high Don Quichote
I live from peyote, marihuana, morhine and cocaine
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain
I see each charwoman
Inhuman, ecstatic, angelic, demonic, devine
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine
“I, Being Born a Woman”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind.
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason.
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, –let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Spiffy. Anyways, here’s the (bit of) poem!
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
-T.S. Eliot; The Waste Lands
verses 20-30
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
I knew someone would select “The Road Not Taken,” and I was tempted to use Dorothy Parker’s “News Item.” But I shall go with “The Way of the World” by Ella Wilcox.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you.
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the brave old earth must borrow its mirth–
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer.
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes rebound to a joyful sound
And shrink from voicing care.
Rejoice, and men will seek you.
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of your pleasure,
But they do not want your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many.
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.
Feast, and your halls are crowded.
Fast, and the world goes by.
Forget and forgive–it helps you to live.
But no man can help you to die.
There’s room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train.
But one by one, we must all march on
Through the narrow aisle of pain.
I could see this happening to the professor. ^_^
The Turkey Shot Out Of The Oven by Jack Prelutsky
The turkey shot out of the oven
And rocketed into the air,
It knocked every plate off the table
And partly demolished a chair.
It ricocheted into a corner
And burst with a deafening boom,
Then splattered all over the kitchen,
Completely obscuring the room.
It stuck to the walls and the windows,
It totally coated the floor,
There was turkey attached to the ceiling,
Where there’d never been turkey before.
It blanketed every appliance,
It smeared every saucer and bowl,
There wasn’t a way I could stop it,
That turkey was out of control.
I scraped and I scrubbed with displeasure,
And thought with chagrin as I mopped,
That I’d never again stuff a turkey
With popcorn that hadn’t been popped!
The Firefly
by Ogden Nash
The firefly’s flame Is something for which science has no name
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a
person’s posteerier.
My Dream
by Ogden Nash
This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.
Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
The Meehoo with an Exactlywatt by Shel Silverstein
Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Me!
Me who?
That’s right!
What’s right?
Meehoo!
That’s what I want to know!
What’s what you want to know?
Me, WHO?
Yes, exactly!
Exactly what?
Yes, I have an Exactlywatt on a chain!
Exactly what on a chain?
Yes!
Yes what?
No, Exactlywatt!
That’s what I want to know!
I told you – Exactlywatt!
Exactly WHAT?
Yes!
Yes what?
Yes, it’s with me!
What’s with you?
Exactlywatt – that’s what’s with me.
Me who?
Yes!
GO AWAY!
Knock knock…
Vegetarians by Roger Mcgough
Vegetarians are cruel, unthinking people.
Everybody knows that a carrot screams when grated.
That a peach bleeds when torn apart.
Do you believe an orange insensitive
to thumbs gouging out its flesh?
That tomatoes spill their brains painlessly?
Potatoes, skinned alive and boiled,
the soil’s little lobsters.
Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt
when peas are ripped from the scrotum,
the hide flayed off sprouts,
cabbage shredded, onions beheaded.
Throw in the trowel
and lay down the hoe.
Mow no more
Let my people go!
Alchemy by Sara Teasdale
I lift my heart as spring lifts up
A yellow daisy to the rain;
My heart will be a lovely cup
Altho’ it holds but pain.
For I shall learn from flower and leaf
That color every drop they hold,
To change the lifeless wine of grief
To living gold.
Consummation Of Grief
by Charles Bukowski
I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.
The late Danish mathematician and poet Piet Hein wrote many, many short poems (in both Danish and English) he called “Grooks”, and often illustrated them with his own drawings. Here are two of my favorites:
THE MIRACLE OF SPRING
We glibly talk
of nature’s laws
but do thing have
a natural cause?
Black earth turned into
yellow crocus
is undiluted
hocus-pocus.
HINT AND SUGGESTION
Admonitory grook addressed to youth.
The human spirit sublimates
the impulses it thwarts;
a healthy sex life mitigates
the lust for other sports.
Hey Audrey! I don’t think I’ve given you this one before:
When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and check’d even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
(It’s Shakespeare, sonnet #15. I figured there’s some good Bunny System imagery in there)
I died from a mineral, and plant became;
Died from a plant, took a sentient frame;
Died from the beast, and donned human dress;
When by my dying did I e’er grow less?
Another time from manhood I must die
To soar with angel-pinions through the sky.
Midst Angels also I must lose my place
Since Everything must perish save God’s Face
Let me be naught! The harp-strings tell me plain
That unto God we return again.
- Jallal-u’ddin Rumi
(Annoyingly I do not know who wrote this translation)
This one screams Bunnies
“i like my body when it is with your” by E. E. Cummings
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new