Famous Airport Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Airport poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous airport poems. These examples illustrate what a famous airport poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Forest Of Europe

...stling like banknotes,
then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?

>From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,
under the airport domes, the echoing stations,
the tributary of emigrants whom exile
has made as classless as the common cold,
citizens of a language that is now yours,

and every February, every "last autumn",
you write far from the threshing harvesters
folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,
far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,
a man living with E...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek


Home

...thing you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did - you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow, each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles traveled meant something more than j...Read more of this...
by Shire, Warsan

Mr. Mine

...He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.
He constructed an overpass when I left.
I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
For traffic lights he handed at red and green
lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

October 12

...My bag was missing at the airport
"Just one bag?" "Yes, but it meant a lot to me"
I had seen the bartender before, but where?
"You didn't tell me you had been to Oxford"
"Yes, I was at Magdalen College for two years"
"What did you do there?" "Drugs."
"Did you know that in Hindi the same word
(kal, pronounced 'kull') means both
yesterday and tomorrow?" "You don't say.
What'll you have...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

Ode To Meaning

...r courting your presence,
And you the prognosis,
You in the cough.

Gesturer, when is your spur, your cloud?
You in the airport rituals of greeting and parting.
Indicter, who is your claimant?
Bell at the gate. Spiderweb iron bridge.
Cloak, video, aroma, rue, what is your
Elected silence, where was your seed?

What is Imagination
But your lost child born to give birth to you?

Dire one. Desired one.
Savior, sentencer--

Absence,
Or presence ever at play:
Let those scorn you w...Read more of this...
by Pinsky, Robert


Passport

...e trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets...Read more of this...
by Darwish, Mahmoud

Self-Portrait At 28

...rn what it's like to live here."
Oftentimes there is a news item
about the complaints of homeowners
who live beside the airport
and I realize that I read an article
on this subject nearly once a year
and always receive the same image.


I am in bed late at night
in my house near the airport
listening to the jets fly overhead
a strange wife sleeping beside me.
In my mind, the bedroom is an amalgamation
of various cold medicine commercial sets
(there is always a box of tissue o...Read more of this...
by Berman, David

The Building

...and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,
Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit
On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags
Haven't come far. More like a local bus.
These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags
And faces restless and resigned, although
Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse

To fetch someone away: the rest refit
Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below
Seats for dr...Read more of this...
by Larkin, Philip

The Cold

...will"?

Whose sympathetic concatenation? Whose picture
withstood "ordeal"?
Who caressed "that tiger"?
Whose laugh at an airport called forth? Whose ground
shifted?...Read more of this...
by Moure, Erin

The Daughter Goes To Camp

...In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hit...Read more of this...
by Olds, Sharon

The New Hieroglyphics

...In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.

Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2S O4, for musical notes,
but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

have escaped their ...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

The Return

...dreamed.

I inherited the book when I was almost seventy
and with it the need to return to who we were.
In the Detroit airport I rented a Taurus;
the woman at the counter was bored or crazy:
Did I want company? she asked; she knew every road
from here to Chicago. She had a slight accent,
Dutch or German, long black hair, and one frozen eye.
I considered but decided to go alone,
determined to find what he had never found.
Slowly the autumn morning warmed, flocks of starlings
...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

Traveling Dream

...I am packing to go to the airport 
but somehow I am never packed. 
I keep remembering more things 
I keep forgetting. 

Secretly the clock is bolting 
forward ten minutes at a click 
instead of one. Each time 
I look away, it jumps. 

Now I remember I have to find 
the cats. I have four cats 
even when I am asleep. 
One is on the bed and I slip 

her into the suitcase. 
One is under ...Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge

When A Woman Loves A Man

...p seven times and threatened to do it
 another nine times.

When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the
 airport in a foreign country with a jeep.
When a man loves a woman he's there. He doesn't complain that
 she's two hours late
and there's nothing in the refrigerator.

When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.

When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as ...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

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