Famous Asbestos Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Making It Work

by Philip Levine
 3-foot blue cannisters of nitro 
along a conveyor belt, slow fish 
speaking the language of silence. 
On the roof, I in my respirator 
patching the asbestos gas lines 
as big around as the thick waist 
of an oak tree. "These here are 
the veins of the place, stuff 
inside's the blood." We work in rain, 
heat, snow, sleet. First...Read more of this...

Freedom of Love

by Andre Breton
 (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white...Read more of this...

Accordion

by Robert William Service
 Some carol of the banjo, to its measure keeping time;
Of viol or of lute some make a song.
My battered old accordion, you're worthy of a rhyme,
You've been my friend and comforter so long.
Round half the world I've trotted you, a dozen years or more;
You've given heaps of people lots of fun;
You've set a host of happy feet a-tapping on...Read more of this...

Tar

by C K Williams
 The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, 
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to 
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble 
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening...Read more of this...

Love Letter Written In A Burning Building

by Anne Sexton
 I am in a crate, the crate that was ours,
full of white shirts and salad greens,
the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,
and I wore movies in my eyes,
and you wore eggs in your tunnel,
and we played sheets, sheets, sheets
all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.
But today I set the bed afire
and smoke is filling the room,
it is getting...Read more of this...

The Swarm

by Sylvia Plath
 Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!

Shh! These are chess people...Read more of this...

Weather

by Ambrose Bierce
 Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be--
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he'd preferred to the...Read more of this...

In The New Sun

by Philip Levine
 Filaments of light 
slant like windswept rain. 
The orange seller hawks 
into the sky, a man with a hat 
stops below my window 
and shakes his tassels. 
 Awake 
in Tetuan, the room filling 
with the first colors, and water running 
in a tub. 

* 

A row of sparkling carp 
iced in the new sun, odor 
of first love,...Read more of this...

Christos

by Paul Muldoon
 Two Workmen were carrying a sheet of asbestos
down the main street of Dingle;
it must have been nailed, at a slight angle,
to the same-sized gap between Brandon

and whichever's the next mountain.
Nine o'clock. We watched the village dogs
take turns to spritz the hotel's refuse-sacks.
I remembered Tralee's unbiodegradable flags

from the time of the hunger-strikes.
We drove all day past mounds of sugar-beet,
hay-stacks, silage-pits,...Read more of this...

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