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Best Famous Black Sheep Poems

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

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Written by Allen Ginsberg | Create an image from this poem

Plutonian Ode

 I

What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
 a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
 Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poison-
 ous hand, named for Death's planet through the 
 sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of 
 Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-
 King worshipped once
with black sheep throats cut, priests's face averted from
 underground mysteries in single temple at Eleusis,
Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable
 Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,
her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, 
 black hail, grey winter rain or Polar ice, immemor-
 able seasons before
Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry
 bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth
or Twins inscribed their memories in clay or Crab'd
 flood
washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the
 lilac breeze in Eden--
Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs,
 ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand
 sunny years
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred 
 sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning 
 black dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disil-
 lusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your
 dreadful presence last majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, 
 Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an
 Abyss of Light,
Sophia's reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirl-
 pools of starspume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!
Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self
 oblivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages'
 prayers, old orators' inspired Immortalities,
I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious
 sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River,
 Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado, 
 Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,
Where nuclear reactors creat a new Thing under the 
 Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death
 stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon
 secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Moun-
 tain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millenia
 while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with 
 your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal
 mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of 
 heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey
 Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance
 speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you,
 Unnaproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your con-
 sciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger
 birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion
 of metal empires!
Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous
 Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful 
 nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of
 Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly indus-
 trious!
Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manu-
 factured Spectre of human reason! O solidified
 imago of practicioner in Black Arts
I dare your reality, I challenge your very being! I 
 publish your cause and effect!
I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!
 Your name enters mankind's ear! I embody your
 ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This 
 breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your 
 form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress
 of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered
 cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ignot 
 cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmo-
 sphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums
 underground on soundless thrones and beds of
 lead
O density! This weightless anthem trumpets transcendent 
 through hidden chambers and breaks through 
 iron doors into the Infernal Room!
Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony 
 floats audible, these jubilant tones are honey and 
 milk and wine-sweet water
Poured on the stone black floor, these syllables are
 barley groats I scatter on the Reactor's core, 
I call your name with hollow vowels, I psalm your Fate
 close by, my breath near deathless ever at your
 side
to Spell your destiny, I set this verse prophetic on your
 mausoleum walls to seal you up Eternally with
 Diamond Truth! O doomed Plutonium.

 II

The Bar surveys Plutonian history from midnight 
 lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps till in dawn's 
 early light
he contemplates a tranquil politic spaced out between 
 Nations' thought-forms proliferating bureaucratic
& horrific arm'd, Satanic industries projected sudden
 with Five Hundred Billion Dollar Strength
around the world same time this text is set in Boulder,
 Colorado before front range of Rocky Mountains
twelve miles north of Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility in 
 United States of North America, Western Hemi-
 sphere
of planet Earth six months and fourteen days around
 our Solar System in a Spiral Galaxy
the local year after Dominion of the last God nineteen 
 hundred seventy eight
Completed as yellow hazed dawn clouds brighten East,
 Denver city white below
Blue sky transparent rising empty deep & spacious to a 
 morning star high over the balcony 
above some autos sat with wheels to curb downhill 
 from Flatiron's jagged pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone
 cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street's
 summer green leafed trees.

 III

This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you
 father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress
 and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers,
 you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and 
 consonants to breath's end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breath
 out this blessing from your breast on our creation 
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains 
 in the Ten Directions pacify with exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder
 through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy
 this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind
 and body speech,
thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone
 out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space,
 so Ah!

 July 14, 1978


Written by G K Chesterton | Create an image from this poem

The Black Virgin

 One in thy thousand statues we salute thee 
On all thy thousand thrones acclaim and claim 
Who walk in forest of thy forms and faces 
Walk in a forest calling on one name 
And, most of all, how this thing may be so 
Who know thee not are mystified to know
That one cries "Here she stands" and one cries "Yonder" 
And thou wert home in heaven long ago. 

Burn deep in Bethlehem in the golden shadows,
Ride above Rome upon the horns of stone,
From low Lancastrian or South Saxon shelters
Watch through dark years the dower that was shine own:
Ghost of our land, White Lady of Walsinghame,
Shall they not live that call upon thy name
If an old song on a wild wind be blowing
Crying of the holy country whence they came? 

Root deep in Chartres the roses blown of glass 
Burning above thee in the high vitrailles, 
On Cornish crags take for salute of swords 
O'er peacock seas the far salute of sails, 
Glooming in bronze or gay in painted wood, 
A great doll given when the child is good, 
Save that She gave the Child who gave the doll, 
In whom all dolls are dreams of motherhood. 

I have found thee like a little shepherdess 
Gay with green ribbons; and passed on to find 
Michael called Angel hew the Mother of God 
Like one who fills a mountain with a mind: 
Molten in silver or gold or garbed in blue, 
Or garbed in red where the inner robe burns through, 
Of the King's daughter glorious within: 
Change shine unchanging light with every hue. 

Clothed with the sun or standing on the moon 
Crowned with the stars or single, a morning star, 
Sunlight and moonlight are thy luminous shadows, 
Starlight and twilight thy refractions are, 
Lights and half-lights and all lights turn about thee, 
But though we dazed can neither see nor doubt thee, 
Something remains. Nor can man live without it 
Nor can man find it bearable without thee. 

There runs a dark thread through the tapestries 
That time has woven with all the tints of time 
Something not evil but grotesque and groping, 
Something not clear; not final; not sublime; 
Quaint as dim pattern of primal plant or tree 
Or fish, the legless elfins of the sea, 
Yet rare as this shine image in ebony 
Being most strange in its simplicity. 

Rare as the rushing of the wild black swans
The Romans saw; or rocks remote and grim
Where through black clouds the black sheep runs accursed 
And through black clouds the Shepherd follows him. 
By the black oak of the aeon-buried grove 
By the black gems of the miner's treasure-trove 
Monsters and freaks and fallen stars and sunken- 
Most holy dark, cover our uncouth love. 

From shine high rock look down on Africa 
The living darkness of devouring green 
The loathsome smell of life unquenchable, 
Look on low brows and blinking eyes between, 
On the dark heart where white folk find no place, 
On the dark bodies of an antic race, 
On all that fear thy light and love thy shadow, 
Turn thou the mercy of thy midnight face. 

This also is in thy spectrum; this dark ray; 
Beyond the deepening purples of thy Lent 
Darker than violet vestment; dark and secret 
Clot of old night yet cloud of heaven sent: 
As the black moon of some divine eclipse, 
As the black sun of the Apocalypse, 
As the black flower that blessed Odysseus back 
From witchcraft; and he saw again the ships. 

In all thy thousand images we salute thee, 
Claim and acclaim on all thy thousand thrones 
Hewn out of multi-colored rocks and risen 
Stained with the stored-up sunsets in all tones- 
If in all tones and shades this shade I feel, 
Come from the black cathedrals of Castille 
Climbing these flat black stones of Catalonia, 
To thy most merciful face of night I kneel.
Written by Roger McGough | Create an image from this poem

Goodbat Nightman

 God bless all policemen
and fighters of crime,
May thieves go to jail
for a very long time.

They've had a hard day
helping clean up the town,
Now they hang from the mantelpiece
both upside down.

A glass of warm blood
and then straight up the stairs,
Batman and Robin
are saying their prayers.

* * *

They've locked all the doors
and they've put out the bat,
Put on their batjamas
(They like doing that)

They've filled their batwater-bottles
made their batbeds,
With two springy battresses
for sleepy batheads.

They're closing red eyes
and they're counting black sheep,
Batman and Robin
are falling asleep.
Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

Gentlmen-Rankers

 To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
 To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,
Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,
 And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.
Yea, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,
 And faith he went the pace and went it blind,
And the world was more than kin while he held the ready tin,
 But to-day the Sergeant's something less than kind.
 We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
 Baa! Baa! Baa!
 We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
 Baa--aa--aa!
 Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
 Damned from here to Eternity,
 God ha' mercy on such as we,
 Baa! Yah! Bah!

Oh, it's sweet to sweat through stables, sweet to empty kitchen slops,
 And it's sweet to hear the tales the troopers tell,
To dance with blowzy housemaids at the regimental hops
 And thrash the cad who says you waltz too well.
Yes, it makes you cock-a-hoop to be "Rider" to your troop,
 And branded with a blasted worsted spur,
When you envy, O how keenly, one poor Tommy being cleanly
 Who blacks your boots and sometimes calls you "Sir".

If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
 And all we know most distant and most dear,
Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep,
 Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?
When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters
 And the horror of our fall is written plain,
Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,
 Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?

We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
 We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
 God help us, for we knew the worst too young!
Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,
 Our pride it is to know no spur of pride,
And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us
 And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.
 We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
 Baa! Baa! Baa!
 We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
 Baa--aa--aa!
 Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
 Damned from here to Eternity,
 God ha' mercy on such as we,
 Baa! Yah! Bah!
Written by Edna St. Vincent Millay | Create an image from this poem

Lament

 When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!


Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

How the Land was Won

 The future was dark and the past was dead 
As they gazed on the sea once more – 
But a nation was born when the immigrants said 
"Good-bye!" as they stepped ashore! 
In their loneliness they were parted thus 
Because of the work to do, 
A wild wide land to be won for us 
By hearts and hands so few. 

The darkest land 'neath a blue sky's dome, 
And the widest waste on earth; 
The strangest scenes and the least like home 
In the lands of our fathers' birth; 
The loneliest land in the wide world then, 
And away on the furthest seas, 
A land most barren of life for men – 
And they won it by twos and threes! 

With God, or a dog, to watch, they slept 
By the camp-fires' ghastly glow, 
Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept 
With "nulla" and spear held low; 
Death was hidden amongst the trees, 
And bare on the glaring sand 
They fought and perished by twos and threes – 
And that's how they won the land! 

It was two that failed by the dry creek bed, 
While one reeled on alone – 
The dust of Australia's greatest dead 
With the dust of the desert blown! 
Gaunt cheek-bones cracking the parchment skin 
That scorched in the blazing sun, 
Black lips that broke in a ghastly grin – 
And that's how the land was won! 

Starvation and toil on the tracks they went, 
And death by the lonely way; 
The childbirth under the tilt or tent, 
The childbirth under the dray! 
The childbirth out in the desolate hut 
With a half-wild gin for nurse – 
That's how the first were born to bear 
The brunt of the first man's curse! 

They toiled and they fought through the shame of it – 
Through wilderness, flood, and drought; 
They worked, in the struggles of early days, 
Their sons' salvation out. 
The white girl-wife in the hut alone, 
The men on the boundless run, 
The miseries suffered, unvoiced, unknown – 
And that's how the land was won. 

No armchair rest for the old folk then – 
But, ruined by blight and drought, 
They blazed the tracks to the camps again 
In the big scrubs further out. 
The worn haft, wet with a father's sweat, 
Gripped hard by the eldest son, 
The boy's back formed to the hump of toil – 
And that's how the land was won! 

And beyond Up Country, beyond Out Back, 
And the rainless belt, they ride, 
The currency lad and the ne'er-do-well 
And the black sheep, side by side; 
In wheeling horizons of endless haze 
That disk through the Great North-west, 
They ride for ever by twos and by threes – 
And that's how they win the rest.
Written by Mother Goose | Create an image from this poem

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

  Baa, baa, black sheep,Have you any wool?Yes, marry, have I,Three bags full;One for my master,One for my dame,But none for the little boyWho cries in the lane.
Written by Henry Lawson | Create an image from this poem

The Never-Never Country

 By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed, 
By railroad, coach, and track -- 
By lonely graves of our brave dead, 
Up-Country and Out-Back: 
To where 'neath glorious the clustered stars 
The dreamy plains expand -- 
My home lies wide a thousand miles 
In the Never-Never Land. 

It lies beyond the farming belt, 
Wide wastes of scrub and plain, 
A blazing desert in the drought, 
A lake-land after rain; 
To the sky-line sweeps the waving grass, 
Or whirls the scorching sand -- 
A phantom land, a mystic land! 
The Never-Never Land. 

Where lone Mount Desolation lies, 
Mounts Dreadful and Despair -- 
'Tis lost beneath the rainless skies 
In hopeless deserts there; 
It spreads nor'-west by No-Man's-Land -- 
Where clouds are seldom seen -- 
To where the cattle-stations lie 
Three hundred miles between. 

The drovers of the Great Stock Routes 
The strange Gulf country know -- 
Where, travelling from the southern drought 
The big lean bullocks go; 
And camped by night where plains lie wide, 
Like some old ocean's bed, 
The watchmen in the starlight ride 
Round fifteen hundred head. 

And west of named and numbered days 
The shearers walk and ride -- 
Jack Cornstalk and the Ne'er-do-well 
And the grey-beard side by side; 
They veil their eyes -- from moon and stars, 
And slumber on the sand -- 
Sad memories steep as years go round 
In Never-Never Land. 

By lonely huts north-west of Bourke, 
Through years of flood and drought, 
The best of English black-sheep work 
Their own salvation out: 
Wild fresh-faced boys grown gaunt and brown -- 
Stiff-lipped and haggard-eyed -- 
They live the Dead Past grimly down! 
Where boundary-riders ride. 

The College Wreck who sank beneath, 
Then rose above his shame, 
Tramps west in mateship with the man 
Who cannot write his name. 
'Tis there where on the barren track 
No last half-crust's begrudged -- 
Where saint and sinner, side by side, 
Judge not, and are not judged. 

Oh rebels to society! 
The Outcasts of the West -- 
Oh hopeless eyes that smile for me, 
And broken hearts that jest! 
The pluck to face a thousand miles -- 
The grit to see it through! 
The communion perfected! -- 
And -- I am proud of you! 

The Arab to true desert sand, 
The Finn to fields of snow, 
The Flax-stick turns to Maoriland, 
While the seasons come and go; 
And this old fact comes home to me -- 
And will not let me rest -- 
However barren it may be, 
Your own land is the best! 

And, lest at ease I should forget 
True mateship after all, 
My water-bag and billy yet 
Are hanging on the wall; 
And if my fate should show the sign 
I'd tramp to sunsets grand 
With gaunt and stern-eyed mates of mine 
In the Never-Never Land.
Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

The Black Sheep

 "The aristocratic ne'er-do-well in Canada frequently finds his way
into the ranks of the Royal North-West Mounted Police." -- Extract.

 Hark to the ewe that bore him:
 "What has muddied the strain?
 Never his brothers before him
 Showed the hint of a stain."
 Hark to the tups and wethers;
 Hark to the old gray ram:
 "We're all of us white, but he's black as night,
 And he'll never be worth a damn."

I'm up on the bally wood-pile at the back of the barracks yard;
"A damned disgrace to the force, sir", with a comrade standing guard;
Making the bluff I'm busy, doing my six months hard.

"Six months hard and dismissed, sir." Isn't that rather hell?
And all because of the liquor laws and the wiles of a native belle--
Some "hooch" I gave to a siwash brave who swore that he wouldn't tell.

At least they say that I did it. It's so in the town report.
All that I can recall is a night of revel and sport,
When I woke with a "head" in the guard-room, and they dragged me sick into court.

And the O. C. said: "You are guilty", and I said never a word;
For, hang it, you see I couldn't--I didn't know what had occurred,
And, under the circumstances, denial would be absurd.

But the one that cooked my bacon was Grubbe, of the City Patrol.
He fagged for my room at Eton, and didn't I devil his soul!
And now he is getting even, landing me down in the hole.

Plugging away on the wood-pile; doing chores round the square.
There goes an officer's lady--gives me a haughty stare--
Me that's an earl's own nephew--that is the hardest to bear.

To think of the poor old mater awaiting her prodigal son.
Tho' I broke her heart with my folly, I was always the white-haired one.
(That fatted calf that they're cooking will surely be overdone.)

I'll go back and yarn to the Bishop; I'll dance with the village belle;
I'll hand round tea to the ladies, and everything will be well.
Where I have been won't matter; what I have seen I won't tell.

I'll soar to their ken like a comet. They'll see me with never a stain;
But will they reform me? --far from it. We pay for our pleasure with pain;
But the dog will return to his vomit, the hog to his wallow again.

I've chewed on the rind of creation, and bitter I've tasted the same;
Stacked up against hell and damnation, I've managed to stay in the game;
I've had my moments of sorrow; I've had my seasons of shame.

That's past; when one's nature's a cracked one, it's too jolly hard to mend.
So long as the road is level, so long as I've cash to spend.
I'm bound to go to the devil, and it's all the same in the end.

The bugle is sounding for stables; the men troop off through the gloom;
An orderly laying the tables sings in the bright mess-room.
(I'll wash in the prison bucket, and brush with the prison broom.)

I'll lie in my cell and listen; I'll wish that I couldn't hear
The laugh and the chaff of the fellows swigging the canteen beer;
The nasal tone of the gramophone playing "The Bandolier".

And it seems to me, though it's misty, that night of the flowing bowl,
That the man who potlatched the whiskey and landed me into the hole
Was Grubble, that unmerciful bounder, Grubble, of the City Patrol.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things