Famous Anyone Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Broadway

by Mark Doty
 Under Grand Central's tattered vault
--maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit--
one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim

billowed over some minor constellation
under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings
in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws

preening, beaks opening and closing
like those animated knives that unfold all night
in jewelers' windows. For sale,

glass eyes turned outward toward the rain,
the birds lined...Read more of this...

The Age

by Osip Mandelstam
 My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries' worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they've brought the peak of...Read more of this...

The Burglar Of Babylon

by Elizabeth Bishop
 On the fair green hills of Rio
 There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
 And can't go home again.

On the hills a million people,
 A million sparrows, nest,
Like a confused migration
 That's had to light and rest,

Building its nests, or houses,
 Out of nothing at all, or air.
You'd think a breath would end them,
 They perch...Read more of this...

Confession

by Louise Gluck
 To say I'm without fear--
It wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I've learned to hide them,
To protect myself
From fulfillment: all happiness
Attracts the Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages--
In the end they have
No emotion but envy....Read more of this...

Metro North

by Mark Doty
 Over the terminal,
 the arms and chest
 of the god

brightened by snow.
 Formerly mercury,
 formerly silver,

surface yellowed
 by atmospheric sulphurs
 acid exhalations,

and now the shining
 thing's descendant.
 Obscure passages,

dim apertures:
 these clouded windows
 show a few faces

or some empty car's
 filmstrip of lit flames
 --remember them

from school,
 how they were supposed
 to teach us something?--

waxy light hurrying
 inches away...Read more of this...

Icicles Round A Tree In Dumfriesshire

by Ruth Padel
 We're talking different kinds of vulnerability here.

These icicles aren't going to last for ever 

Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun.

But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning,

And the famous American sculptor 

Who scrambles the world with his tripod

For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them. 

It's not comfortable, a double helix of opalescent...Read more of this...

The Singing School

by Barry Tebb
 The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business:

So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray,

Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either-

You know its flim-flam on the ether, grants for Jack-the-lads

Of both sexes, poets who’ve never been seen in a little magazine

Then gone on to win the Oopla Prize and...Read more of this...

Without The Wherewithall

by Barry Tebb
 To Thushari Williams 

Dear Thushie, the six months you spent with us 

Will never be forgotten, the long days you laboured

In the care home, your care-worn comings home

To sit with Brenda Williams, po?te maudit sang pur,

Labouring together to bring to light poems buried alive

And turn them into a book, the living text 

Proof enough of your divine gift as...Read more of this...

Letter Home

by Natasha Trethewey
 --New Orleans, November 1910

Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position Though I dress each day
in...Read more of this...

Place for a Third

by Robert Frost
 Nothing to say to all those marriages!
She had made three herself to three of his.
The score was even for them, three to three.
But come to die she found she cared so much:
She thought of children in a burial row;
Three children in a burial row were sad.
One man's three women in a burial row
Somehow made her impatient with the man.
And...Read more of this...

Wants Poems And Has Never Rejected Anyone

by Barry Tebb
 Eamer o’ Keefe with your tinge of brogue

And Irish warmth, Daisy and Debjani 

With your karma and cool verse, I salute you.

( III )

"Ecoutez la voix du vent" – listen to the wind’s voice

As Milosz commands "All your griefs,

My sad ones, are in vain" but offering

In recompense soaring sonatas which remain unread

Untranslated, relegated to the reserve stock

Of the Institut...Read more of this...

The Fair Maid of Perths House

by William Topaz McGonagall
 All ye good people, afar and near,
To my request pray lend an ear;
I advise you all without delay to go
And see the Fair Maid's House - it is a rare show. 

Some of the chairs there are very grand,
They have been cut and carved by a skilful hand;
And kings, perchance, if fhe truth were told,
Have sat on them in...Read more of this...

Woolworths

by Mark Hillringhouse
 for Greg Fallon

A kid yells "*************" out the school bus window.
I don't think anyone notices the afternoon clouds turning pink along the horizon,
sunlight dripping down the stone facades,
the ancient names of old stores fading like the last century
above the street, above the Spandex women who adjust their prize buttocks,
sweating in the sun as I wonder how this city...Read more of this...

Letters From A Man In Solitary

by Nazim Hikmet
 1
I carved your name on my watchband
with my fingernail.
Where I am, you know,
I don't have a pearl-handled jackknife
(they won't give me anything sharp)
 or a plane tree with its head in the clouds.
Trees may grow in the yard,
but I'm not allowed
 to see the sky overhead...
How many others are in this place?
I don't know.
I'm alone far from them,
they're all...Read more of this...

In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me

by Elizabeth Jennings
 At this particular time I have no one
Particular person to grieve for, though there must
Be many, many unknown ones going to dust
Slowly, not remembered for what they have done
Or left undone. For these, then, I will grieve
Being impartial, unable to deceive.

How they lived, or died, is quite unknown,
And, by that fact gives my grief purity--
An important person quite apart...Read more of this...

Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town

by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and samll)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their
same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more...Read more of this...

XVII (Thinking Tangling Shadows...)

by Pablo Neruda
 Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,
burying lamps.

Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there!
Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes,
taciturn miller,
night falls on you face downward, far from the city.

Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.
I think, I explore great tracts of my life...Read more of this...

The Code

by Robert Frost
 There were three in the meadow by the brook 
Gathering up windrows, piling cocks of hay, 
With an eye always lifted toward the west 
Where an irregular sun-bordered cloud 
Darkly advanced with a perpetual dagger 
Flickering across its bosom. Suddenly 
One helper, thrusting pitchfork in the ground, 
Marched himself off the field and home. One stayed. 
The town-bred farmer...Read more of this...

safe-home

by Rg Gregory
 don't be so lazy maisie maisie
don't be so lazy please
i know it's snowing
and a hard wind's blowing
but nobody knows
at the rate we're going
what time we'll get home tonight

keep to the path for me timothy timothy
keep to the path for me please
my legs are aching
and my poor back's breaking
and everyone knows
the track you're taking
will not fetch us home tonight

i know...Read more of this...

Snow Day

by Billy Collins
 Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while I will put on some boots
and step out...Read more of this...

My Suicide

by Robert William Service
 I've often wondered why
Old chaps who choose to die
In evil passes,
Before themselves they slay,
Invariably they
Take off their glasses?

As I strolled by the Castle cliff
An oldish chap I set my eyes on,
Who stood so singularly stiff
And stark against the blue horizon;
A poet fashioning a sonnet,
I thought - how rapt he labours on it!

And then I blinked and stood astare,
And questioned...Read more of this...

Being Young And Green

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Being Young and Green, I said in love's despite:
Never in the world will I to living wight
Give over, air my mind
To anyone,
Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind
To be shredded and faded—

Oh, me, invaded
And sacked by the wind and the sun!...Read more of this...

Losses

by Randall Jarrell
 It was not dying: everybody died. 
It was not dying: we had died before 
In the routine crashes-- and our fields 
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, 
And the rates rose, all because of us. 
We died on the wrong page of the almanac, 
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; 
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a...Read more of this...

Pauls Wife

by Robert Frost
 To drive Paul out of any lumber camp
All that was needed was to say to him,
"How is the wife, Paul?"--and he'd disappear.
Some said it was because be bad no wife,
And hated to be twitted on the subject;
Others because he'd come within a day
Or so of having one, and then been Jilted;
Others because he'd had one once, a good one,
Who'd...Read more of this...

The Borders

by Sharon Olds
 To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother—I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me—she appeared within me.
And my mother did not enter me.
When she lay down, to pray, on me,
she was always ferociously courteous,
fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,
but the barrier of my skin...Read more of this...

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