This one by Anne Sexton always stood out to me

I’m stupid and don’t know anything about poetry, but I like Questions from a Worker Who Reads by Brecht. And Intrusion by Denise Levertov

After I had cut off my hands

and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for

came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes

had withered, and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for

came asking to be pitied.

To Be Read In the Interrogative Mood

Have you seen have you really seen the snow the stars the plush steps of the breeze Have you touched have you really touched the plate the bread the face of the woman you adore Have you lived like a blow to the head the shock the gasp the fall the flight Have you known in every pore of your knowing skin how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart must be thrown away must be mourned away must be invented once more all over again

— Julio Cortázar

John Ashbery - “Just Walking Around”

What names do I have for you? Certainly there is no name for you In the sense that the stars have names That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some, But you are too preoccupied By the secret smudge in the back of your soul To say much, and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others. It gets kind of lonely But at the same time off-putting, Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way, The one that looped among islands, and You always seemed to be traveling in a circle. And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange. There is light in there, and mystery and food. Come see it. Come not for me but it. But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

'The Kraken' by Alfred Tennyson: Below the thunders of the upper deep,  

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,  

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep 

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee  

About his shadowy sides; above him swell  

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;  

And far away into the sickly light, 

 From many a wondrous grot and secret cell  

Unnumbered and enormous polypi 

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.  

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie  

Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,  

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;  

Then once by man and angels to be seen,  

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

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Sonnet XXX
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

Thirtieth Anniversary Report of the Class of '41

We who survived the war and took to wife
And sired the kids and made the decent living,
And piecemeal furnished forth the finished life
Not by grand theft so much as petty thieving--

Who had the routine middle-aged affair
And made our beds and had to lie in them
This way or that because the beds were there,
And turned our bile and choler in for phlegm--

Who saw grandparents, parents, to the vault
And wives and selves grow wrinkled, grey and fat
And children through their acne and revolt
And told the analyst about all that--

Are done with it. What is there to discuss?
There's nothing left for us to say of us.

/END/

Shakes me to the core tbh, profoundly desolate interpretation of the Greatest Generation, one I hope still meets the intent of your prompt

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh

Having a coke with you - Frank O’Hara

Love (III)- George Herbert

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat. 

I don't really understand poetry that well, so my choices are really basic:

Saddest poem - Pablo Neruda

Mad girls love song - Sylvia Plath

The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams

And my go to feel good bless is the lake isle of innisfree by Yeats

Politics by Yeats. It’s the concept and understatement, coming at the end of his life.

I’m not too well-read in poetry so my picks might be a bit basic. But these are the ones that touched me and stuck with me the most:

• Kahlil Gibran: Defeat

• Edmund Cooke: How did you die?

• ME Frye: Do not stand at my grave and weep

• Walter Wintle: State of Mind

And of course the even more obvious picks of Tennyson’s Ulysses and Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle… would be remiss not to mention.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I often return to long poems (Anne Carson, Octavio Paz, Vincent Huidobro) or epics. To fit here, a poem in which a surface becomes a depth becomes a question:

Boy Breaking Glass by BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Whose broken window is a cry of art   

(success, that winks aware

as elegance, as a treasonable faith)

is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.

Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.   

Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.   

If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light

and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank

if you see there’s no extension.   

Each to his grief, each to

his loneliness and fidgety revenge.

Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.   

The music is in minors.

Each one other

is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!   

And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,   

the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,   

runs. A sloppy amalgamation.

A mistake.

A cliff.

A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

Steps by Frank O’Hara Animals by Frank O’Hara On Seeing the Elgin Marbles by Keats Antony and Cleopatra by WS Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery

The Garden by Marvell
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44682/the-garden-56d223dec2ced

Holy Sonnets: Batter my Heart, three-personed God By John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

David Berman’s “Self-Portrait at 28” is one I think a line from all the time just incidentally

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49304/sunflower-sutra

<3

Valediction a forbidding mourning by Dunne

Andrew Marvell, "The Mower to the Glowworms"

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light

The nightingale does sit so late,

And studying all the summer night,

Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend

No war nor prince’s funeral,

Shining unto no higher end

Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame

To wand’ring mowers shows the way,

That in the night have lost their aim,

And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,

Since Juliana here is come,

For she my mind hath so displac’d

That I shall never find my home.

Ada Limon State Bird:

And Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Love the George Herbert poem most but the first that came to mind was Peanut Butter by Eileen Myles. I can't figure out how to format it so you'll have to google yourself

George oppen

Pope‘s “An essay on criticism”

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Theory of Memory by Louise Gluck (also her poem From a Journal)

For Grace, After a Party by Frank O’Hara

The Letter by Linda Gregg

I would’ve said “Having a Coke with You,” but someone beat me to it so i’ll say “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence as it comes to mind.

• Ocean Vuong