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Poetry
Someone has asked me why I'm sending these poems to the GB list. My answer is that a lot of the mails on this list seem to centre on issues of love, desire, sex and relationships. People come to this list looking for someone, trying to get over losing someone, trying to make sense of their relationships with someone, or just trying to deal with their loneliness, their lack of someone in their lives. 
On GayBombay:

Coming Soon :

  • The More Loving One - W. H. Auden

  • Banalata Sen- Jibanananda Das

  • Be Near Me - Faiz Ahmed Faiz

  • Against Coupling - Fleur Adcock

  • Quick and Bitter - Yehuda Amichai

  • He Asked About the Quality - C.P. Cavafy

  • No Road - Philip Larkin

  • Carnal Knowledge - Thom Gunn

  • A Prison Evening - Faiz Ahmed Faiz

  • True Love - Wislawa Szymborska

  • Love Without Hope - Robert Graves

  • Sonnets II - Edna St. Vincent Millay

  • The Kiss - Sara Teasdale

  • Warning - Jenny Joseph

  • Now through night's caressing grip - W. H. Auden

  • To His Coy Mistress - Andrew Marvell

  • Sonnet XXIX - William Shakespeare

  • Sailing - Henrik Nordbrandt

  • A Renewal - James MerrillLay your sleeping head, my love - W. H. Auden

  • Celia Celia - Adrian Mitchell

  • We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye - Anna Akhmatova

  • Sometimes - Sheenagh Pugh

  • 3 Queer Poems - Horold Norse, Arthur Rimbaud, Michael Lassell

  • Andulasian Verses - Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Sahl, Abd Allah ibn Sara, Abu Ali al-Hysayn al-Nassar.

  • The Hug - Thom Gunn

  • Therese - Brahms

  • I release you - Owais

  • More Arab Verses - Abu Yafar Ahmad al-Kasad, al-Zaqqaq, Jehhaludin Rumi

  • Sonnet - Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud.

  • To My Son - Siegfried Sasson

  • He would not stay for me; and who can wonder? - A. E. Housman

  • Christmas Eve - Edwin Morgan

  • Body, Remember.... - Constantine P. Cavafy

  • The Tobacconist's Window (1917) - Constantine P. Cavafy

  • Song to the Skinhead - Glyn Maxwell

  • Maybe - Carl Sandburg

  • For My Lover, Returning to His Wife - Anne Sexton

  • Room Mates - Elma Mitchell

  • Saturday Morning - Hugo Williams

  • Don't Ask Me For That Love Again - Faiz Ahmed Faiz

  • Write About 'Happiness' - Carol Ann Duffy

  • Moonlight - B.S. Mardhekar

  • The Windows - Constantine P. Cavafy

  • Che Fece... II Gran Rifiuto - constantine P. Cavafy

  • Truth of Love - W.H. Auden

  • The Gateway - A.D. Hope

  • In the Tavernas - Constantine P. Cavafy

  • My True Love Hath My Heart, and I Have His - Sir Philip Sidney

  • Funeral Blues - W. H. Auden

  • A Puppy Called Puberty - Adrian Mitchell

  • Poetry of Departures - Phillip Larkin

  • 7301 - U. A. Fanthorpe

  • An Arundel Tomb - Phillip Larkin

  • Tram-Ride, 1939(F.M.) - Edwin Morgan

  • I loved you; even now I may confess - Alexander Pushkin

  • One Cigarette- Edwin Morgan

  • Squaring Up - Roger McGough

  • Marriage a la mode - John Dryden

  • The laws of God, the Laws of man - A. E. Housman

  • Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? - A.E. Housman

  • Episode of Hands - Hart Crane

  • The Bandaged Shoulder - constantine P. Cavafy

  • The Wound - Dresser - Walt Whitman

  • Public Meeting and Parting as Private Acts - Firaq Gorakhpuri

  • Words, Wide Night - Carol Ann Duffy

Someone has asked me why I'm sending these poems to the GB list. My answer is that a lot of the mails on this list seem to centre on issues of love, desire, sex and relationships. People come to this list looking for someone, trying to get over losing someone, trying to make sense of their relationships with someone, or just trying to deal with their loneliness, their lack of someone in their lives. 

These are never easy issues to deal with and different people find different ways. For me poetry has been one of the most consistently helpful means of dealing with these problems. Poetry is condensed emotion, the experiences of other people who have dealt with these issues, concentrated into a few words. Its like the hard candies you eat while on a trek. As you suck on them, and worry at them, they release jolts of energy. Reading poetry is a way to understand your own life. 

But many people, I find, tend to be put off poetry. They've had bad experiences with it in school where indifferent teachers have left them with the idea that its baffling or boring. Their mind just seizes up when they see what looks like a poem. Something cues that this is difficult, and their eyes glaze over and they don't really read it or try to get any value from it. 

That's the importance of occasional poems in magazines, or of schemes like London's Poem On The Underground, that put posters with short poems on the advertising spaces in the underground trains. Coming at you unexpectedly, they make you realise that poetry doesn't have to be hard or impossible to understand, and I hope that these occasional emails on the list can affect some readers in the same way. 

-- Compiled By Vikram
Uploaded on 08-Feb-2002
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