Famous Long Yellow Poems

Famous Long Yellow Poems. Long Yellow Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Yellow long poems

See also: Long Member Poems

 Tiny green birds skate over the surface of the room.
A naked girl prepares a basin with steaming water,
And in the corner away from the hearth, the red wheels
Of an up-ended chariot slowly turn.
After a long moment, the door to the other world opens
And the golden figure of a man appears. He stands
Ruddy as a salmon beside the niche where are kept
The keepsakes of the Prince of Earth; then sadly, drawing
A hammer out of his side, he advances to an oaken desk,
And being careful to strike in exact fury, pounds it to bits.
Another woman has by now taken her station
Beside the bubbling tub.
Her legs are covered with a silken blue fur,
Which in places above the knees
Grows to the thickness of a lion's mane.
The upper sphere of her chest
Is gathered into huge creases by two jeweled pins.
Transparent little boots reveal toes
Which an angel could want.
Beneath her on the floor a beautiful cinnamon cat
Plays with a bunch of yellow grapes, running
Its paws in and out like a boy being a silly king.
Her voice is round and white as she says:
'Your bath is ready, darling. Don't wait too long.'
But he has already drawn away to the window
And through its circular opening looks,
As a...
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 WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?

Who picked a crimson cryptogram,
the tail light of a motor car turning a corner,
or the midnight sign of a chile con carne place,
or a man out of the ashes of false dawn muttering “hot-dog” to the night watchmen:
Is there a spieler who has spoken the word or taken the number of night’s nothings? am I the spieler? or you?

Is there a tired head
the night has not fed and rested
and kept on its neck and shoulders?

Is there a wish
of man to woman
and woman to man
the night has not written
and signed its name under?

Does the night forget
as a woman forgets?
and remember
as a woman remembers?

Who gave the night
this head of hair,
this gipsy head
calling: Come-on?

Who gave the night anything at all
and asked the night questions
and was laughed at?

Who asked the night
for a long soft kiss
and lost the half-way lips?
who picked a red lamp in a mist?

Who saw the night
fold its Mona Lisa hands
and sit half-smiling, half-sad,
nothing at all,
and everything,
all the world ?

Who saw the night
let down its hair
and shake its bare shoulders
and blow out the candles of the moon,
whispering, snickering,
cutting off the snicker .. and...
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 Here is a silence I had not hoped for

This side of paradise, I am an old believer

In nature’s bounty as God’s grace

To us poor mortals, fretting and fuming

At frustrated lust or the scent of fame 

Coming too late to make a difference

Blue with white vertebrae of cloud forms

Riming the spectrum of green dark of poplars

Lined like soldiers, paler the hue of hawthorn 

With the heather beginning to bud blue

Before September purple, yellow ragwort

Sways in the wind as distantly a plane hums

And a lazy bee bumbles by.

A day in Brenda’s flat, mostly play with Eydie,

My favourite of her seven cats, they soothe better

Than Diazepan for panic

Seroxat for grief

Zopiclone to make me sleep.

I smoke my pipe and sip blackcurrant tea

Aware of the ticking clock: I have to be back

To talk to my son’s key nurse when she comes on

For the night shift. Always there are things to sort,

Misapprehensions to untangle, delusions to decipher,

Lies to expose, statistics to disclose, Trust Boards

And team meetings to attend, ‘Mental Health Monthly’

To peruse, funds for my press to raise – the only one 

I ever got will leave me out of pocket.

A couple sat on the next bench

Are earnestly discussing child custody, broken marriages,

Failed affairs, social...
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 Earendil was a mariner
that tarried in Arvernien;
he built a boat of timber felled
in Nimbrethil to journey in;
her sails he wove of silver fair,
of silver were her lanterns made,
her prow was fashioned like a swan
and light upon her banners laid.

In panolpy of ancient kings,
in chained rings he armoured him;
his shining shield was scored with runes
to ward all wounds and harm from him;
his bow was made of dragon-horn,
his arrows shorn of ebony;
of silver was his habergeon,
his scabbard of chalcedony;
his sword of steel was valient,
of adamant his helmet tall,
an eagle-plume upon his crest,
upon his breast an emerald.

Beneath the Moon and under star
he wandered far from northern strands,
bewildered on enchanted ways
beyond the days of mortal lands.

From gnashing of the Narrow Ice
where shadow lies on frozen hills,
from nether heats and burning waste
he turned in haste, and roving still
on starless waters far astray
at last he came to Night of Naught,
and passed, and never sight he saw
of shining shore nor light he sought.

The winds of wrath came driving him,
and blindly in the foam he fled
from west to east and errandless,
unheralded he homeward sped.

There flying Elwing came to him,
and flame was in the darkness lit;
more bright than light of diamond
the fire on her carcanet.

The Silmaril she bound...
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 Frau Doktor,
Mama Brundig,
take out your contacts,
remove your wig.
I write for you.
I entertain.
But frogs come out
of the sky like rain.

Frogs arrive
With an ugly fury.
You are my judge.
You are my jury.

My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I'll take a knife
and chop up frog.

Frog has not nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father's genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob.
Frog is a soft bag of green.

The moon will not have him.
The sun wants to shut off
like a light bulb.
At the sight of him
the stone washes itself in a tub.
The crow thinks he's an apple
and drops a worm in.
At the feel of frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Slime will have him.
Slime has made him a house.

Mr. Poison
is at my bed.
He wants my sausage.
He wants my bread.

Mama Brundig,
he wants my beer.
He wants my Christ
for a souvenir.

Frog has boil disease
and a bellyful of parasites.
He says: Kiss me. Kiss me.
And the ground soils itself.

Why
should a certain
quite adorable princess
be walking in her garden
at such a time
and toss her golden ball
up like a bubble
and drop it into the well?
It was ordained.
Just as the fates deal out
the plague with a tarot card.
Just as the Supreme Being drills
holes in our skulls to let
the Boston Symphony through.

But I digress.
A loss has taken place.
The...
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 Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said, "Speak to us of Crime and Punishment." 

And he answered saying: 

It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, 

That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself. 

And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while unheeded at the gate of the blessed. 

Like the ocean is your god-self; 

It remains for ever undefiled. 

And like the ether it lifts but the winged. 

Even like the sun is your god-self; 

It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. 

But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being. 

Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, 

But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening. 

And of the man in you would I now speak. 

For it is he and not your god-self nor the pigmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime. 

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of...
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 Never mind the day we left, or the day the women clung to us; 
All we need now is the last way they looked at us. 
Never mind the twelve men there amid the cheering— 
Twelve men or one man, ’t will soon be all the same; 
For this is what we know: we are five men together,
Five left o’ twelve men to find the golden river. 

Far we came to find it out, but the place was here for all of us; 
Far, far we came, and here we have the last of us. 
We that were the front men, we that would be early, 
We that had the faith, and the triumph in our eyes:
We that had the wrong road, twelve men together,— 
Singing when the devil sang to find the golden river. 

Say the gleam was not for us, but never say we doubted it; 
Say the wrong road was right before we followed it. 
We that were the front men, fit for all forage,—
Say that while we dwindle we are front men still; 
For this is what we know tonight: we’re starving here together— 
Starving on the wrong road to find the golden river. 

Wrong,...
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 The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began
With someone dying.

 When her mother died,
My mother refused to attend the funeral--
In fact, she sulked in her tent all through the year
Of the old lady's dying. I don't know why:
She said, because she loved her mother so much
She couldn't bear to see the way the doctors,
Or her father, or--someone--was letting her mother die.
"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet."

She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint.
Possibly that's the reason I write these poems.

But they did speak: on the phone. Wept and argued,
So fiercely one or the other often cut off
A sentence by hanging up in rage--like lovers,
But all that year she never saw her face.

They lived on the same block, four doors apart.
"Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace;
With them that walk against me is my sun."

"Synagogue" is a word I never heard,
We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school.
Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east.
"Lay institution": she taught me we...
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 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.

Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn't or in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
statistically a survivor (that
is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.

She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
but transatlantic schedules intervened.
She wrote a book about...
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 O THOU! whatever title suit thee—
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,
Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie,
 Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brunstane cootie,
 To scaud poor wretches!


Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An’ let poor damned bodies be;
I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gie,
 Ev’n to a deil,
To skelp an’ scaud poor dogs like me,
 An’ hear us squeel!


Great is thy pow’r an’ great thy fame;
Far ken’d an’ noted is thy name;
An’ tho’ yon lowin’ heuch’s thy hame,
 Thou travels far;
An’ faith! thou’s neither lag nor lame,
 Nor blate, nor scaur.


Whiles, ranging like a roarin lion,
For prey, a’ holes and corners tryin;
Whiles, on the strong-wind’d tempest flyin,
 Tirlin the kirks;
Whiles, in the human bosom pryin,
 Unseen thou lurks.


I’ve heard my rev’rend graunie say,
In lanely glens ye like to stray;
Or where auld ruin’d castles grey
 Nod to the moon,
Ye fright the nightly wand’rer’s way,
 Wi’ eldritch croon.


When twilight did my graunie summon,
To say her pray’rs, douse, honest woman!
Aft’yont the dyke she’s heard you bummin,
 Wi’ eerie drone;
Or, rustlin, thro’ the boortrees comin,
 Wi’ heavy groan.


Ae dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light,
Wi’ you, mysel’ I gat a fright,
 Ayont the lough;
Ye, like a rash-buss, stood in...
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 Part One - The Calling


Let me sleep, for my soul is intoxicated with love and 
Let me rest, for my spirit has had its bounty of days and nights; 
Light the candles and burn the incense around my bed, and 
Scatter leaves of jasmine and roses over my body; 
Embalm my hair with frankincense and sprinkle my feet with perfume, 
And read what the hand of Death has written on my forehead. 


Let me rest in the arms of Slumber, for my open eyes are tired; 
Let the silver-stringed lyre quiver and soothe my spirit; 
Weave from the harp and lute a veil around my withering heart. 


Sing of the past as you behold the dawn of hope in my eyes, for 
It's magic meaning is a soft bed upon which my heart rests. 


Dry your tears, my friends, and raise your heads as the flowers 
Raise their crowns to greet the dawn. 
Look at the bride of Death standing like a column of light 
Between my bed and the infinite; 
Hold your breath and listen with me to the beckoning rustle of 
Her white wings. 


Come close and bid me farewell; touch my eyes with smiling lips. 
Let...
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 The drought is down on field and flock, 
The river-bed is dry; 
And we must shift the starving stock 
Before the cattle die. 
We muster up with weary hearts 
At breaking of the day, 
And turn our heads to foreign parts, 
To take the stock away. 
And it’s hunt ‘em up and dog ‘em, 
And it’s get the whip and flog ‘em, 
For it’s weary work, is droving, when they’re dying every day; 
By stock routes bare and eaten, 
On dusty roads and beaten, 
With half a chance to save their lives we take the stock away. 


We cannot use the whip for shame 
On beasts that crawl along; 
We have to drop the weak and lame, 
And try to save the strong; 
The wrath of God is on the track, 
The drought fiend holds his sway; 
With blows and cries the stockwhip crack 
We take the stock away. 
As they fall we leave them lying, 
With the crows to watch them dying, 
Grim sextons of the Overland that fasten on their prey; 
By the fiery dust-storm drifting, 
And the mocking mirage shifting, 
In heat and drought and hopeless pain we take the stock away. 


In dull despair the...
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 RUM tiddy um,
 tiddy um,
 tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road?
When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain’t too much rain or too little:
 Say, why do I feel so gabby?
 Why do I want to holler all over the place?. . .
Do you remember I held empty hands to you
 and I said all is yours
 the handfuls of nothing?. . .
I ask you for white blossoms.
I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.
I bring out “The Spanish Cavalier” and “In the Gloaming, O My Darling.”

The orchard here is near and home-like.
The oats in the valley run a mile.
Between are the green and marching potato vines.
The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, “Excuse … me…”. . .
Old foundations of rotten wood.
An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight.
So a...
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 I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken. 

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And...
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 You pull over to the shoulder
 of the two-lane
road and sit for a moment wondering
 where you were going
in such a hurry. The valley is burned
 out, the oaks
dream day and night of rain
 that never comes.
At noon or just before noon
 the short shadows
are gray and hold what little
 life survives.
In the still heat the engine
 clicks, although
the real heat is hours ahead.
 You get out and step
cautiously over a low wire
 fence and begin
the climb up the yellowed hill.
 A hundred feet
ahead the trunks of two
 fallen oaks
rust; something passes over
 them, a lizard
perhaps or a trick of sight.
 The next tree
you pass is unfamiliar,
 the trunk dark,
as black as an olive's; the low
 branches stab
out, gnarled and dull: a carob
 or a Joshua tree.
A sudden flaring-up ahead,
 a black-winged
bird rises from nowhere,
 white patches
underneath its wings, and is gone.
 You hear your own
breath catching in your ears,
 a roaring, a sea
sound that goes on and on
 until you lean
forward to place both hands
 -- fingers spread --
into the bleached grasses
 and let your knees
slowly down. Your breath slows
 and you know
you're back in central
 California
on your way to San Francisco
 or the coastal towns
with their damp...
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