Famous Banana Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Valentine

...olls a scornful eye
On doting me when I go by;
And though she scouts at everything
As tribute unto her I bring -
Apple, banana, caramel -
Haste, Cupid, to my love and tell,
In spite of all, I love her well!

And further say I have a sled
Cushioned in blue and painted red!
The groceryman has promised I
Can "hitch" whenever he goes by -
Go, tell her that, and, furthermore,
Apprise my sweetheart that a score
Of other little girls implore
The boon of riding on that sled
Painted a...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene


Bleezers Ice Cream

...COTASH
BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE
POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL
PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM
PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM
BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER
CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER
AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT
PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT
COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD
CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD
ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP
TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP
GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA
LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA
ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET
WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
taste a fla...Read more of this...
by Prelutsky, Jack

Bojangles And Jo

...Stairstep music: ups,
downs, Bill Robinson smiling,
jazzdancing the rounds.

She raised champagne lips,
danced inside banana hips.
All Paris wooed Jo.

Banana panties,
perfumed belt, Jazz tatooing
lush ecstasies felt.

Josephine, royal,
jewelling her dance, flushing
the bosom of France....Read more of this...
by Emanuel, James A

Conversation with Jeanne

...d essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of m...Read more of this...
by Milosz, Czeslaw

Elegy: Walking the Line

...Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze,
Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple, 
Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub,
The owls’ tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump 
Thirty feet down the mountain’s granite foot. 

Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even driv...Read more of this...
by Bowers, Edgar


Face Lift

...carf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for m...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

Giant Fungus

...ails,
dragonflies, and great horned owls.

The land below teems with elands
and kit foxes, badgers, aardvarks,
juniper, banana slugs, larch,
cactus, heather, humankind.

Under them, a dome of dirt.
Under that, the World's
Largest Living Thing spreads
like a hemorrhage poised

to paralyze the earth—like a tumor
ready to cause 9.0 convulsions,
or a brain dreaming this world
of crickets and dung beetles,

sculpins, Beethoven, coots,
Caligula, St. Augustine grass, Mister
Lincoln ...Read more of this...
by Webb, Charles

Impossible To Tell

...ike ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing. "Bashõ"

He named himself, "Banana Tree": banana
After the plant some grateful students gave him,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher's heart: live, rigid, fluid

Like passages etched in a microscopic cicuit.
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed li...Read more of this...
by Pinsky, Robert

Part 8 of Trout Fishing in America

...would make me lunch, little egg sandwich-

es with the crusts cut off as if by a surgeon, and she'd give

me slices of banana dunked in mayonnaise.

 The old woman lived by herself in a house that was like a

twin sister to her. The house was four stories high and had

at least thirty rooms and the old lady was five feet high and

weighed about eighty-two pounds.

 She had a big radio from the 1920s in the living room and

it was the only thing in the house that looked remot...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Sabbaths W.I

...es, or the incurable sore
of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are
selling yellow sulphur stone

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance
the river whose bed is made of broken bottles
the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and
yellow and in the lights under the leaves crested with
orange flame has forgotten its flute

gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea

the dead lizard turning blue as stone

those rivers, threads of spi...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

Song of the Wise Children

...ugh:

To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond,
 And the tree-toad's chorus drowning all --
And the lisp of the split banana-frond
 That talked us to sleep when we were small.

The wayside magic, the threshold spells,
 Shall soon undo what the North has done --
Because of the sights and the sounds and the smells
 That ran with our youth in the eye of the sun.

And Earth accepting shall ask no vows,
 Nor the Sea our love, nor our lover the Sky.
When we return to our Father's...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Sphincter

...tle blood, no polyps, occasionally
a small hemorrhoid
active, eager, receptive to phallus
 coke bottle, candle, carrot
 banana & fingers -
Now AIDS makes it shy, but still
 eager to serve -
out with the dumps, in with the condom'd
 orgasmic friend -
still rubbery muscular,
unashamed wide open for joy
But another 20 years who knows,
 old folks got troubles everywhere - 
necks, prostates, stomachs, joints--
 Hope the old hole stays young
 till death, relax

 March 15, 1986, 1:0...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Sunflower Sutra

...I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The only water on t...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

...daggers of every size
Which nations of militant men could devise.
Poisoned spears from tropic seas,
That natives, under banana trees,
Smear with the juice of some deadly snake.
Blood-dipped arrows, which savages make
And tip with feathers, orange and green,
A quivering death, in harlequin sheen.
High up, a fan of glancing steel
Was formed of claymores in a wheel.
Jewelled swords worn at kings' levees
Were suspended next midshipmen's dirks, and these
Elbowed stilettos come fro...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Bough of Nonsense

...sense hymn,” 
R. “Hanging it up with monkey tails
In a deep grove all hushed and dim….” 
S. “To glorious yellow-bunched banana-trees,” 
R. “Planted in dreams by pious Portuguese,” 

S. “Which men are wise beyond their time, 
And worship nonsense, no one more.”
R. “Hard by, among old quince and lime, 
They’ve built a temple with no floor,” 
S. “And whosoever worships in that place, 
He disappears from sight and leaves no trace.” 

R. “Once the Galatians built a fane
To Sense: ...Read more of this...
by Graves, Robert

The Bridge

...writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother, 
guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while 
eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I 
shall be crossing it shortly. I don't know if I shall find hills and 
valleys made of flesh on the other side, or simply constant 
night, villages of sleep. The ape is scolding me for not teaching 
him better. I am letting him wear my pith helmet for 
consolation. The bridge looks like one of those skele...Read more of this...
by Edson, Russell

The Contents of My Desk

...A nail.
A nickel.
A snail.
A pickle.
A twisted-up
slinky.
A ring for
my pinky.
A blackened
banana.
A love note
from Hannah.
My doodles
of rockets.
The lint from
my pockets.
A fork-like
utensil.
But sorry…
no pencil.

 --Kenn Nesbitt

Copyright © Kenn Nesbitt 2009. All Rights Reserved....Read more of this...
by Nesbitt, Kenn

The Mercy

...ship that took my mother to Ellis Island 
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." 
She remembers trying to eat a banana 
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman 
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her 
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over. 
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening 
with the black waters calming as night came on, 
then nothing as far as her ey...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

The Quality Of Sprawl

...even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth. 

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

Who dares to take this life from me Knows no better

...nd in the mornings cherry sticks
To gum: the infectious chilli smiles
Over touch-me-not thorns, crushing snails
From banana leaves, past
Clawing outstretched arms of the bougainvilias
To stone the salt-bite mangoes.

Tread carefully through this durian kampong
For the ripe season has pricked many a sole.

II
la la la tham'-pong
Let's go running intermittent
To the spitting, clucking rubber fruit
And bamboo lashes through the silent graves,
Fresh sod, red mounds...Read more of this...
by Wignesan, T

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