Famous Beaks Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Earthworm

by Anne Sexton
 Slim inquirer, while the old fathers sleep
you are reworking their soil, you have
a grocery store there down under the earth
and it is well stocked with broken wine bottles,
old cigars, old door knobs and earth,
that great brown flour that you kiss each day.
There are dark stars in the cool evening and
you fondle them like killer birds' beaks.
But what I want...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 02: 05: Retrospect

by Conrad Aiken
 Round white clouds roll slowly above the housetops,
Over the clear red roofs they flow and pass.
A flock of pigeons rises with blue wings flashing,
Rises with whistle of wings, hovers an instant,
And settles slowly again on the tarnished grass.

And one old man looks down from a dusty window
And sees the pigeons circling about the fountain
And desires once more to walk...Read more of this...

two spanish poems

by Rg Gregory
 (a) orihuela-time

the sun in orihuela calms the dust
and people glide about the streets at ease
(problems left indoors to cool themselves)
time has grown fat and no one cares
to pin each minute to its proper place
the day is long tomorrow's not yet real

doves and old men occupy the squares
nattering to each other in such tongues
that take the clock away from what...Read more of this...

Authors Prologue

by Dylan Thomas
 This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons,...Read more of this...

The Proud Poet

by Joyce Kilmer
 (For Shaemas O Sheel)

One winter night a Devil came and sat upon my bed,
His eyes were full of laughter for his heart was full of crime.
"Why don't you take up fancy work, or embroidery?" he said,
"For a needle is as manly a tool as a pen that makes a rhyme!"
"You little ugly Devil," said I, "go back to Hell
For...Read more of this...

cherries and birds

by Rg Gregory
 cherries are so vulnerable
blinking their way from green
to polished red in trees
guileless to stave off birds

a murmur does its rounds
and when the bright day comes
and ripeness throws its coyness
in the air a seething mesh

of wings and whetted beaks 
(knowing its cherry-right)
falls upon the fleshy fruit
and rips it to the stone

then birds become the foe
of people leaden in their legs
who...Read more of this...

elusive wisdom

by Rg Gregory
 thoth (who became hermes who became mercury)
who was both moon and wisdom to the egyptians
manifested himself mainly as an ibis - a watery bird
a restless creature that could not stop searching
through marshy ground with its sickle-shaped beak

so to the christians the bird became a scavenger
the worst sinner from whom sins sprout forth and grow
sacred ibises have had to learn...Read more of this...

Landscape of a Pissing Multitude

by Federico García Lorca
 The men kept to themselves:
they were waiting for the swiftness of the last cyclists.
The women kept to themselves:
they were expecting the death of a boy on a Japanese schooner.
They all kept to themselves-
dreaming of the open beaks of dying birds,
the sharp parasol that punctures
a recently flattened toad,
beneath silence with a thousand ears
and tiny mouths of water
in the canyons that...Read more of this...

The Raven Days

by Sidney Lanier
 Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
Some strip of sea-green dawn, some...Read more of this...

The Lost Battle

by Victor Hugo
 ("Allah! qui me rendra-") 
 
 {XVI., May, 1828.} 


 Oh, Allah! who will give me back my terrible array? 
 My emirs and my cavalry that shook the earth to-day; 
 My tent, my wide-extending camp, all dazzling to the sight, 
 Whose watchfires, kindled numberless beneath the brow of night, 
 Seemed oft unto the sentinel that...Read more of this...

The Most

by Charles Bukowski
 here comes the fishhead singing
here comes the baked potato in drag
here comes nothing to do all day long
here comes another night of no sleep
here comes the phone wringing the wrong tone
here comes a termite with a banjo
here comes a flagpole with blank eyes
here comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons
here comes a machine gun saying
here comes bacon...Read more of this...

Poem On His Birthday

by Dylan Thomas
 In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
 Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
 And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
 He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
 Herons spire and spear.

 Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
 Doing what they...Read more of this...

Epitaph In The Form Of A Ballade

by Francois Villon
 Freres humains qui apres nous vivez, 
N'ayez les coeurs contre nous endurcis ... 
Men, brother men, that after us yet live, 
Let not your hearts too hard against us be; 
For if some pity of us poor men ye give, 
The sooner God shall take of you pity. 
Here are we five or six strung up, you see, 
And...Read more of this...

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...

In Those Years

by Adrienne Rich
 In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but...Read more of this...

Captain Carpenter

by John Crowe Ransom
 Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime 
Put on his pistols and went riding out 
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time 
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout. 

It was a pretty lady and all her train 
That played with him so sweetly but before 
An hour she'd taken a sword with all her main...Read more of this...

The Sun Weilds Mercy

by Charles Bukowski
 and the sun weilds mercy
but like a jet torch carried to high,
and the jets whip across its sight
and rockets leap like toads,
and the boys get out the maps
and pin-cuishon the moon,
old green cheese,
no life there but too much on earth:
our unwashed India boys
crosssing their legs,playing pipes,
starving with sucked in bellies,
watching the snakes volute
like beautiful women in the hungry air;
the...Read more of this...

Roosters

by Elizabeth Bishop
 At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match 
from the broccoli patch,
flares,and all over town begins to catch.

Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,

where...Read more of this...

A Watch In The Night

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Watchman, what of the night? - 
Storm and thunder and rain, 
Lights that waver and wane,
Leaving the watchfires unlit. 
Only the balefires are bright, 
And the flash of the lamps now and then 
From a palace where spoilers sit, 
Trampling the children of men.

Prophet, what of the night? - 
I stand by the verge of the sea, 
Banished, uncomforted,...Read more of this...

hawthorns and the like

by Rg Gregory
 as the landscape falls away
the hawthorn in its gnarly fashion
is content to stand alone
berries (the very tint of passion)
that birds are wont to feed upon
bloodstain the shortened day

a stubborn tree that speaks
of crusty age - its thorns alert
to any too-spirited invasion
who comes (it seems to say) gets hurt 
not those birds with juicy beaks
insects swarm – by invitation

come may...Read more of this...

Dalliance of the Eagles The

by Walt Whitman
 SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) 
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles, 
The rushing amorous contact high in space together, 
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel, 
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling, 
Till o’er the river...Read more of this...

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