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Best Famous Basilica Poems

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

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Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

Roosters

 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 in the blue blur their rusting wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens' lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town.
A rooster gloats over our beds from rusty irons sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally's: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, "This is where I live!" Each screaming "Get up! Stop dreaming!" Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled "Very combative.
.
.
" what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry "Here!" and "Here!" and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood Yes, that excrescence makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence Now in mid-air by two they fight each other.
Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying.
And one has fallen but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter.
He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize.
St.
Peter's sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter's, falling, beneath the flares, among the "servants and officers.
" Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed.
But in between a little cock is seen carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it, There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter's tears run down our chanticleer's sides and gem his spurs.
Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits.
Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that event the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that "Deny deny deny" is not all the roosters cry.
In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? gilding the tiny floating swallow's belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day's preamble like wandering lines in marble, The cocks are now almost inaudible.
The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend.


Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Consolation

 How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous domes and there is no need to memorize a succession of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps? Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time? Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice, I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress known as Dot.
I will slide into the flow of the morning paper, all language barriers down, rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.
And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car as if it were the great car of English itself and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.
Written by Tristan Tzara | Create an image from this poem

The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three

 where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies 
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica
mad : the zigzags crack
telephone
bite the rigging liquefy
the arc
climb
astral
memory
towards the north through its double fruit
like raw flesh
hunger fire blood
Written by Czeslaw Milosz | Create an image from this poem

Father Explains

 "There where that ray touches the plain
And the shadows escape as if they really ran,
Warsaw stands, open from all sides,
A city not very old but quite famous.
"Farther, where strings of rain hang from a little cloud, Under the hills with an acacia grove Is Prague.
Above it, a marvelous castle Shored against a slope in accordance with old rules.
"What divides this land with white foam Is the Alps.
The black means fir forests.
Beyond them, bathing in the yellow sun Italy lies, like a deep-blue dish.
"Among the many fine cities that are there You will recogni2e Rome, Christendom's capital, By those round roofs on the church Called the Basilica of Saint Peter.
"And there, to the north, beyond a bay, Where a level bluish mist moves in waves, Paris tries to keep pace with its tower And reins in its herd of bridges.
"Also other cities accompany Paris, They are adorned with glass, arrayed in iron, But for today that would be too much, I'll tell the rest another time

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry