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Best Famous Attention Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Attention poems. This is a select list of the best famous Attention poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Attention poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of attention poems.

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Written by Robert Pinsky | Create an image from this poem

Impossible To Tell

 to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,

The secret courtesy that courses like 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 like microbes in a culture Inside his brain, one so much making another It was impossible to tell them all: In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.
Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother, Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child And her new baby in a squalid apartment Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.
She tells the child she's going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages.
Hoping to distract her, The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations Of different people in the building, he jokes, He feels if he keeps her alive until the father Gets home from work, they'll be okay till morning.
It's laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.
What is he in his efforts but a courtier? Impossible to tell his whole delusion.
In the first months when I had moved back East From California and had to leave a message On Bob's machine, I used to make a habit Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through, I would pretend that I forgot the punchline, Or make believe that I was interrupted-- As though he'd be so eager to hear the end He'd have to call me back.
The joke was Elliot's, More often than not.
The doctors made the blunder That killed him some time later that same year.
One day when I got home I found a message On my machine from Bob.
He had a story About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short, One day while walking along the street together They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them, And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.
Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy, Impossible to tell--a dead-end challenge.
But here it is, as Elliot told it to me: The dead man's widow came to the rabbis weeping, Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.
Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.
But the short rabbi told her to bring the body Into the study house, and ordered the shutters Closed so the room was night-dark.
Then he prayed Over the body, chanting a secret blessing Out of Kabala.
"Arise and breathe," he shouted; But nothing happened.
The body lay still.
So then The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles And danced around the body, chanting and praying In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic.
He prayed In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes Seemed not to touch the floor.
With one last prayer Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man's face.
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture And said, "Arise and breathe!" And still the body Lay as before.
Impossible to tell In words how Elliot's eyebrows flailed and snorted Like shaggy mammoths as--the Chinese widow Granting permission--the little rabbi sang The blessing for performing a circumcision And removed the dead man's foreskin, chanting blessings In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse From head to foot, and with a final prayer In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion, He seized the dead man's head and kissed the lips And dropped it again and leaping back commanded, "Arise and breathe!" The corpse lay still as ever.
At this, as when Bashõ's disciples wind Along the curving spine that links the renga Across the different voices, each one adding A transformation according to the rules Of stasis and repetition, all in order And yet impossible to tell beforehand, Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer, Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching, A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: "Hoo boy!" he says, "Now that's what I call really dead.
" O mortal Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal Lords of the underground and afterlife, Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto, What has a brilliant, living soul to do with Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers, Our languages don't touch you, you're like that mother Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi, The one who washed his hands of all those capers Right at the outset.
Or maybe he became The author of these lines, a one-man renga The one for whom it seems to be impossible To tell a story straight.
It was a routine Procedure.
When it was finished the physicians Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded, But Elliot wouldn't wake up for maybe an hour, They should go eat.
The two of them loved to bicker In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish, On Sandra's to some Sicilian dialect.
He used to scold her endlessly for smoking.
When she got back from dinner with their children The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.
Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent, Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.
But the Universal is the goal of jokes, Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures Toward their preposterous Ithaca.
There's one A journalist told me.
He heard it while a hero Of the South African freedom movement was speaking To elderly Jews.
The speaker's own right arm Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.
He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared As "in with the Arabs.
" But they started weeping As the old one-armed fighter told them their country Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote Could make a country their children could return to From London and Chicago.
The moved old people Applauded wildly, and the speaker's friend Whispered to the journalist, "It's the Belgian Army Joke come to life.
" I wish I could tell it To Elliot.
In the Belgian Army, the feud Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious, So out of hand the army could barely function.
Finally one commander assembled his men In one great room, to deal with things directly.
They stood before him at attention.
"All Flemings," He ordered, "to the left wall.
" Half the men Clustered to the left.
"Now all Walloons," he ordered, "Move to the right.
" An equal number crowded Against the right wall.
Only one man remained At attention in the middle: "What are you, soldier?" Saluting, the man said, "Sir, I am a Belgian.
" "Why, that's astonishing, Corporal--what's your name?" Saluting again, "Rabinowitz," he answered: A joke that seems at first to be a story About the Jews.
But as the renga describes Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl, So in the joke, just under the raucous music Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow, Over the banana tree the moon in autumn-- Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.


Written by Pablo Neruda | Create an image from this poem

A Dog Has Died

 My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.
Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

A Little History

 Some people find out they are Jews.
They can't believe it.
Thy had always hated Jews.
As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old neighborhood, looking for Jews.
They were not Jewish, they were Irish.
They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their lips, looking for Jews.
They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.
Sometimes they were content to chase a Jew and he could elude them by running away.
They were happy just to see him run away.
The coward! All Jews were yellow.
They spelled Jew with a small j jew.
And now they find out they are Jews themselves.
It happened at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
To escape persecution, they pretended to convert to Christianity.
They came to this country and settled in the Southwest.
At some point oral tradition failed the family, and their secret faith died.
No one would ever have known if not for the bones that turned up on the dig.
A disaster.
How could it have happened to them? They are in a state of panic--at first.
Then they realize that it is the answer to their prayers.
They hasten to the synagogue or build new ones.
They are Jews at last! They are free to marry other Jews, and divorce them, and intermarry with Gentiles, God forbid.
They are model citizens, clever and thrifty.
They debate the issues.
They fire off earnest letters to the editor.
They vote.
They are resented for being clever and thrifty.
They buy houses in the suburbs and agree not to talk so loud.
They look like everyone else, drive the same cars as everyone else, yet in their hearts they know they're different.
In every minyan there are always two or three, hated by the others, who give life to one ugly stereotype or another: The grasping Jew with the hooked nose or the Ivy League Bolshevik who thinks he is the agent of world history.
But most of them are neither ostentatiously pious nor excessively avaricious.
How I envy them! They believe.
How I envy them their annual family reunion on Passover, anniversary of the Exodus, when all the uncles and aunts and cousins get together.
They wonder about the heritage of Judaism they are passing along to their children.
Have they done as much as they could to keep the old embers burning? Others lead more dramatic lives.
A few go to Israel.
One of them calls Israel "the ultimate concentration camp.
" He tells Jewish jokes.
On the plane he gets tipsy, tries to seduce the stewardess.
People in the Midwest keep telling him reminds them of Woody Allen.
He wonders what that means.
I'm funny? A sort of nervous intellectual type from New York? A Jew? Around this time somebody accuses him of not being Jewish enough.
It is said by resentful colleagues that his parents changed their name from something that sounded more Jewish.
Everything he publishes is scrutinized with reference to "the Jewish question.
" It is no longer clear what is meant by that phrase.
He has already forgotten all the Yiddish he used to know, and the people of that era are dying out one after another.
The number of witnesses keeps diminishing.
Soon there will be no one left to remind the others and their children.
That is why he came to this dry place where the bones have come to life.
To live in a state of perpetual war puts a tremendous burden on the population.
As a visitor he felt he had to share that burden.
With his gift for codes and ciphers, he joined the counter- terrorism unit of army intelligence.
Contrary to what the spook novels say, he found it possible to avoid betraying either his country or his lover.
This was the life: strange bedrooms, the perfume of other men's wives.
As a spy he has a unique mission: to get his name on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record.
Only by doing that would he get the message through to his immediate superior.
If he goes to jail, he will do so proudly; if they're going to hang him anyway, he'll do something worth hanging for.
In time he may get used to being the center of attention, but this was incredible: To talk his way into being the chief suspect in the most flamboyant murder case in years! And he was innocent! He could prove it! And what a book he would write when they free him from this prison: A novel, obliquely autobiographical, set in Vienna in the twilight of the Hapsburg Empire, in the year that his mother was born.
Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Child Development

 As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.
Every day a new one arrives and is added to the repertoire.
You Dumb Goopyhead, You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor (a kind of Navaho ring to that one) they yell from knee level, their little mugs flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.
They are just tormenting their fellow squirts or going after the attention of the giants way up there with their cocktails and bad breath talking baritone nonsense to other giants, waiting to call them names after thanking them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.
The mature save their hothead invective for things: an errant hammer, tire chains, or receding trains missed by seconds, though they know in their adult hearts, even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed for his appalling behavior, that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids, their wives are Dopey Dopeheads and that they themselves are Mr.
Sillypants.
Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky | Create an image from this poem

At the Top of My voice

 My most respected
 comrades of posterity!
Rummaging among
 these days’ 
 petrified crap,
exploring the twilight of our times,
you,
 possibly,
 will inquire about me too.
And, possibly, your scholars will declare, with their erudition overwhelming a swarm of problems; once there lived a certain champion of boiled water, and inveterate enemy of raw water.
Professor, take off your bicycle glasses! I myself will expound those times and myself.
I, a latrine cleaner and water carrier, by the revolution mobilized and drafted, went off to the front from the aristocratic gardens of poetry - the capricious wench She planted a delicious garden, the daughter, cottage, pond and meadow.
Myself a garden I did plant, myself with water sprinkled it.
some pour their verse from water cans; others spit water from their mouth - the curly Macks, the clever jacks - but what the hell’s it all about! There’s no damming al this up - beneath the walls they mandoline: “Tara-tina, tara-tine, tw-a-n-g.
.
.
” It’s no great honor, then, for my monuments to rise from such roses above the public squares, where consumption coughs, where whores, hooligans and syphilis walk.
Agitprop sticks in my teeth too, and I’d rather compose romances for you - more profit in it and more charm.
But I subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song.
Listen, comrades of posterity, to the agitator the rabble-rouser.
Stifling the torrents of poetry, I’ll skip the volumes of lyrics; as one alive, I’ll address the living.
I’ll join you in the far communist future, I who am no Esenin super-hero.
My verse will reach you across the peaks of ages, over the heads of governments and poets.
My verse will reach you not as an arrow in a cupid-lyred chase, not as worn penny Reaches a numismatist, not as the light of dead stars reaches you.
My verse by labor will break the mountain chain of years, and will present itself ponderous, crude, tangible, as an aqueduct, by slaves of Rome constructed, enters into our days.
When in mounds of books, where verse lies buried, you discover by chance the iron filings of lines, touch them with respect, as you would some antique yet awesome weapon.
It’s no habit of mine to caress the ear with words; a maiden’s ear curly-ringed will not crimson when flicked by smut.
In parade deploying the armies of my pages, I shall inspect the regiments in line.
Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand, ready for death and for immortal fame.
The poems are rigid, pressing muzzle to muzzle their gaping pointed titles.
The favorite of all the armed forces the cavalry of witticisms ready to launch a wild hallooing charge, reins its chargers still, raising the pointed lances of the rhymes.
and all these troops armed to the teeth, which have flashed by victoriously for twenty years, all these, to their very last page, I present to you, the planet’s proletarian.
The enemy of the massed working class is my enemy too inveterate and of long standing.
Years of trial and days of hunger ordered us to march under the red flag.
We opened each volume of Marx as we would open the shutters in our own house; but we did not have to read to make up our minds which side to join, which side to fight on.
Our dialectics were not learned from Hegel.
In the roar of battle it erupted into verse, when, under fire, the bourgeois decamped as once we ourselves had fled from them.
Let fame trudge after genius like an inconsolable widow to a funeral march - die then, my verse, die like a common soldier, like our men who nameless died attacking! I don’t care a spit for tons of bronze; I don’t care a spit for slimy marble.
We’re men of kind, we’ll come to terms about our fame; let our common monument be socialism built in battle.
Men of posterity examine the flotsam of dictionaries: out of Lethe will bob up the debris of such words as “prostitution,” “tuberculosis,” “blockade.
” For you, who are now healthy and agile, the poet with the rough tongue of his posters, has licked away consumptives’ spittle.
With the tail of my years behind me, I begin to resemble those monsters, excavated dinosaurs.
Comrade life, let us march faster, march faster through what’s left of the five-year plan.
My verse has brought me no rubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.
In all conscience, I need nothing except a freshly laundered shirt.
When I appear before the CCC of the coming bright years, by way of my Bolshevik party card, I’ll raise above the heads of a gang of self-seeking poets and rogues, all the hundred volumes of my communist-committed books.
Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.


Written by Shel Silverstein | Create an image from this poem

The Little Boy and the Old Man

 Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon.
" Said the old man, "I do that too.
" The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants.
" "I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry.
" The old man nodded, "So do I.
" "But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me.
" And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"I know what you mean," said the little old man.
Written by Maggie Estep | Create an image from this poem

**** Me

 **** ME
I'm all screwed up so
**** ME.
**** ME and take out the garbage feed the cat and **** ME you can do it, I know you can.
**** ME and theorize about Sado Masochism's relationship to classical philosophy tell me how this stimulates the fabric of most human relationships, I love that kind of pointless intellectualism so do it again and **** ME.
Stop being logical stop contemplating the origins of evil and the beauty of death this is not a TV movie about Plato sex life, this is **** ME so **** ME It's the pause that refreshes just add water and **** ME.
I wrote this so I'd have a good excuse to say "**** ME" over and over and over so I could get a lot of attention and look, it worked! So thank you thank you and **** ME.
Written by A R Ammons | Create an image from this poem

Easter Morning

 I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, it’s convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how he’s shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school

teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone

the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can’t get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it can’t come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from

I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
air that holds the world that was my world

though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and –headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
they turned a few more times, possibly
rising—at least, clearly resting—
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brook’s
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.
Written by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings | Create an image from this poem

Since Feeling is First

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves 
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.
Don't cry the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis
Written by Carolyn Kizer | Create an image from this poem

Parents Pantoum

 for Maxine Kumin

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses More ladylike than we have ever been? But they moan about their aging more than we do, In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.
They moan about their aging more than we do, A somber group--why don't they brighten up? Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity The beg us to be dignified like them As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention Then we won't try to be dignified like them Nor they to be so gently patronizing.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars? Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish? Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden, So now we pout like children.
Second-childish? Quaint fragments of forgotten history? Our daughters stroll together in the garden, Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore, Pausing to toss us morsels of their history, Not questions to which only we know answers.
Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore, We'd rather excavate old memories, Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories? Because they hate to excavate old memories They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors, We offspring of our enormous children.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry