Best Famous Catfish Poems

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

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• All Famous Catfish Poems

Written by Carl Sandburg | Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs RUM tiddy um, tiddy um, tiddy um tum tum. My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves. I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road? When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain’t too much rain or too little: Say, why do I feel so gabby? Why do I want to holler all over the place?. . . Do you remember I held empty hands to you and I said all is yours the handfuls of nothing?. . . I ask you for white blossoms. I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. I bring out “The Spanish Cavalier” and “In the Gloaming, O My Darling. ” The orchard here is near and home-like. The oats in the valley run a mile. Between are the green and marching potato vines. The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, “Excuse … me…”. . . Old foundations of rotten wood. An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight. So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory. Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun. . . . The story lags. The story has no connections. The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks. The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes. . . . In Burlington long ago And later again in Ashtabula I said to myself: I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet. What else was there Shakespeare never told? There must have been something. If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia. There was class to the way she went out of her head. . . . Does a famous poet eat watermelon? Excuse me, ask me something easy. I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning. And the Japanese, two-legged like us, The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures. The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat. Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon? Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high. Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches. I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town. And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of melons. . . . Niggers play banjos because they want to. The explanation is easy. It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen’s masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers’ picnic with a fat man’s foot race. It is the same as why boys buy a nickel’s worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel’s worth. Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved. The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory. It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split away from a school-room geography lesson in April when the crawfishes come out and the young frogs are calling and the pussywillows and the cat-tails know something about geography themselves. . . . I ask you for white blossoms. I offer you memories and people. I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines. I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees. I make up songs about things to look at: potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots; a cavalryman’s yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart. Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. Let romance stutter to the western stars, “Excuse … me…”

Written by Chris Tusa | MARIE LAVEAU TALKS ABOUT MAGIC FROM A CONFESSIONAL IN ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL Marie Laveau, a colored woman who eventually became known as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, often used her knowledge of Voodoo to manipulate and acquire power. --Enigma In one quick lick I waved my mojo hand, made the Mississippi’s muddy spine run crooked as a crow’s foot, scared politicians into my pocket with lizard tongues and buzzard bones, convinced the governor to sing my name under a sharp crescent moon white as a gator’s tooth. Now my magic got the whole Vieux Carré waltzing with redfish and rooster heads, got Protestants blessing okra and cayenne, Catholics chasing black cats down Dumaine, even got Creoles two-stepping with pythons along the banks of Bayou St. John. They say soon my powers gonna fade, that there’s a noose aloose in the streets looking for a neck to blame. But I’m just a lowly colored woman and ain’t nobody gonna blame a worm for scaring a catfish onto a hook.

Written by Richard Hugo | Underwater Autumn Now the summer perch flips twice and glides a lateral fathom at the first cold rain, the surface near to silver from a frosty hill. Along the weed and grain of log he slides his tail. Nervously the trout (his stream-toned heart locked in the lake, his poise and nerve disgraced) above the stirring catfish, curves in bluegill dreams and curves beyond the sudden thrust of bass. Surface calm and calm act mask the detonating fear, the moving crayfish claw, the stare of sunfish hovering above the cloud-stained sand, a sucker nudging cans, the grinning maskinonge. How do carp resolve the eel and terror here? They face so many times this brown-ribbed fall of leaves predicting weather foreign as a shark or prawn and floating still above them in the paling sun.

Written by Richard Hugo | Death Of The Kapowsin Tavern I can't ridge it back again from char. Not one board left. Only ash a cat explores and shattered glass smoked black and strung about from the explosion I believe in the reports. The white school up for sale for years, most homes abandoned to the rocks of passing boys--the fire, helped by wind that blew the neon out six years before, simply ended lots of ending. A damn shame. Now, when the night chill of the lake gets in a troller's bones where can the troller go for bad wine washed down frantically with beer? And when wise men are in style again will one recount the two-mile glide of cranes from dead pines or the nameless yellow flowers thriving in the useless logs, or dots of light all night about the far end of the lake, the dawn arrival of the idiot with catfish--most of all, above the lake the temple and our sanctuary there? Nothing dies as slowly as a scene. The dusty jukebox cracking through the cackle of a beered-up crone-- wagered wine--sudden need to dance-- these remain in the black debris. Although I know in time the lake will send wind black enough to blow it all away.

Written by Paul Laurence Dunbar | FISHING Wen I git up in de mo'nin' an' de clouds is big an' black, Dey's a kin' o' wa'nin' shivah goes a-scootin' down my back; Den I says to my ol' ooman ez I watches down de lane, "Don't you so't o' reckon, Lizy, dat we gwine to have some rain?" "Go on, man," my Lizy answah, "you cain't fool me, not a bit, I don't see no rain a-comin', ef you's wishin' fu' it, quit; Case de mo' you t'ink erbout it, an de mo' you pray an' wish, W'y de rain stay 'way de longah, spechul ef you wants to fish." But I see huh pat de skillet, an' I see huh cas' huh eye Wid a kin' o' anxious motion to'ds de da'kness in de sky; An' I knows whut she 's a-t'inkin', dough she tries so ha'd to hide. She 's a-sayin', "Would n't catfish now tas'e monst'ous bully, fried?" Den de clouds git black an' blackah, an' de thundah 'mence to roll, An' de rain, it 'mence a-fallin'. Oh, I's happy, bless my soul! Ez I look at dat ol' skillet, an' I 'magine I kin see Jes' a slew o' new-ketched catfish sizzlin' daih fu' huh an' me.[Pg 173] 'T ain't no use to go a-ploughin', fu' de groun' 'll be too wet, So I puts out fu' de big house at a moughty pace, you bet, An' ol' mastah say, "Well, Lishy, ef you t'ink hit 's gwine to rain, Go on fishin', hit 's de weathah, an' I 'low we cain't complain." Talk erbout a dahky walkin' wid his haid up in de aih! Have to feel mine evah minute to be sho' I got it daih; En' de win' is cuttin' capahs an' a-lashin' thoo de trees, But de rain keeps on a-singin' blessed songs, lak "Tek yo' ease." Wid my pole erpon my shouldah an' my wo'm can in my han', I kin feel de fish a-waitin' w'en I strikes de rivah's san'; Nevah min', you ho'ny scoun'els, need n' swim erroun' an' grin, I 'll be grinnin' in a minute w'en I 'mence to haul you in. W'en de fish begin to nibble, an' de co'k begin to jump, I 's erfeahed dat dey 'll quit bitin', case dey hyeah my hea't go "thump," 'Twell de co'k go way down undah, an' I raise a awful shout, Ez a big ol' yallah belly comes a gallivantin' out. Need n't wriggle, Mistah Catfish, case I got you jes' de same, You been eatin', I 'll be eatin', an' we needah ain't to blame. But you need n't feel so lonesome fu' I 's th'owin' out to see Ef dey ain't some of yo' comrades fu' to keep you company. Spo't, dis fishin'! now you talkin', w'y dey ain't no kin' to beat; I don' keer ef I is soakin', laigs, an' back, an' naik, an' feet, It 's de spo't I 's lookin' aftah. Hit 's de pleasure an' de fun, Dough I knows dat Lizy 's waitin' wid de skillet w'en I's done.