display posts on homepage

hi technical gurus!

im a noob at this so im need some help. ive created a custom template and im wanting to display 5 latest posts in a column i have, problem is, i can only get the titles of the posts and not the content.

this is what i have so far:

<?php
if (is_page()) {
  $cat=get_cat_ID($post->post_title); //use page title to get a category ID
  $posts = get_posts ("cat=$cat&showposts=5");
  if ($posts) {
    foreach ($posts as $post):
      setup_postdata($post); ?>
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
    <?php endforeach;
  }
}
?>

any help would be much appreciated, thanks.