First Entry:

I joined Open Salon finally after lurking around for almost a year reading some of the best poets that write here. I like poetry very much and more than half of my books are on poetry and poets. I don't write myself but I plan to use this as a place where I post some of my favorite poems that I read in the past and if someone else happens to read and like them too then that's just fine. I hope to post once a week. It would be nice to put pictures to go with the themes of the poems but I am new and I don't know how to do those things yet.  Thank you.

The first poem is by Thomas Hardy 
 
Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

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I like this poem because it has so many levels. It creates a beautiful and calm winter scene, but also in that calmness the poet introduces the idea of age and death through the skinny black cat which comes up the white slopes and we cannot refuse but accept him.