10 Best Famous Robert Bly Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Robert Bly poems. This is a select list of the best famous Robert Bly poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Robert Bly poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of robert bly poems.

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Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
The size of skulls 
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
Maybe we could get
A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring for a keepsake forever.

As I drive my parents home through the snow 
their frailty hesitates on the edge of a mountainside.
I call over the cliff 
only snow answers.
They talk quietly
of hauling water of eating an orange 
of a grandchild's photograph left behind last night.
When they open the door of their house they disappear.
And the oak when it falls in the forest who hears it through miles and miles of silence?
They sit so close to each other¡­as if pressed together by the snow.

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

Conversation brings us so close! Opening
The surfs of the body 
Bringing fish up near the sun 
And stiffening the backbones of the sea!

I have wandered in a face for hours 
Passing through dark fires.
I have risen to a body
Not yet born 
Existing like a light around the body
Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

Nigh and day arrive and day after day goes by 
And what is old remains old and what is young remains young and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow younger nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness 
but the old tree goes on the barn stands without help so many years;
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.

The horse steps up swings on one leg turns its body 
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost its wings whelping and walloping 
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and the dark.
And slowly the kind man comes closer loses his rage sits down at table.

So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness 
when you sit drawing or making books stapled with messages to the world 
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together calm and delighted.

 The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."

the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"


Translated by Robert Bly

1

Oh on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh 
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

2

Rising from a bed where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals 
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night
Bathed in dark water like any blade of grass.

3

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree 
Plunging in the wind call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe 
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant 
And live forever like the dust.

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone plowing underfoot no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

There has been a light snow.
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.
I have awakened at Missoula Montana utterly happy.

Darkness is falling through darkness 
Falling from ledge
To ledge.
There is a man whose body is perfectly whole.
He stands the storm behind him 
And the grass blades are leaping in the wind.
Darkness is gathered in folds
About his feet.
He is no one. When we see
Him we grow calm 
And sail on into the tunnels of joyful death.