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Best Famous Brownstone Poems

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

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Written by Amy Clampitt | Create an image from this poem

A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street

 While the sun stops, or
seems to, to define a term
for the indeterminable,
the human aspect, here
in the West Village, spindles
to a mutilated dazzle—

niched shards of solitude
embedded in these brownstone
walkups such that the Hudson
at the foot of Twelfth Street
might be a thing that's 
done with mirrors: definition

by deracination—grunge,
hip-hop, Chinese takeout,
co-ops—while the globe's
elixir caters, year by year,
to the resurgence of this
climbing tentpole, frilled and stippled

yet again with bloom
to greet the solstice:
What year was it it over-
took the fire escape? The
roof's its next objective.
Will posterity (if there 

is any)pause to regret
such layerings of shade,
their cadenced crests' trans-
valuation of decay, the dust
and perfume of an all
too terminable process?


Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

Letter to N.Y

for Louise crane


In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so ***** and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch, 
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing, 
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry