10 Best Famous Decades Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Decades poems. This is a select list of the best famous Decades poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Decades poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of decades poems.

• All Famous Decades Poems

 Today the Masons are auctioning 
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans, 
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes 
labeled inside the collar "Potentate" 
and "Vizier." Here their chairs, blazoned 
with the Masons' sign, huddled 
like convalescents, lean against one another 

on the grass. In a casket are rhinestoned poles 
the hierophants carried in parades; 
here's a splendid golden staff some ranking officer waved, 
topped with a golden pyramid and a tiny, 
inquisitive sphinx. No one's worn this stuff 
for years, and it doesn't seem worth buying; 
where would we put it? Still, 

I want that staff. I used to love 
to go to the library -- the smalltown brick refuge 
of those with nothing to do, really, 
'Carnegie' chiseled on the pediment 
above columns that dwarfed an inconsequential street. 
Embarrassed to carry the same book past 
the water fountain's plaster centaurs 

up to the desk again, I'd take 
The Wonders of the World to the Reading Room 
where Art and Industry met in the mural 
on the dome. The room smelled like two decades 
before I was born, when the name 
carved over the door meant something. 
I never read the second section, 

"Wonders of the Modern World"; 
I loved the promise of my father's blueprints, 
the unfulfilled turquoise schemes, 
but in the real structures 
you could hardly imagine a future. 
I wanted the density of history, 
which I confused with the smell of the book: 

Babylon's ziggurat tropical with ferns, 
engraved watercourses rippling; 
the Colossus of Rhodes balanced 
over the harbormouth on his immense ankles. 
Athena filled one end of the Parthenon, 
in an "artist's reconstruction", 
like an adult in a dollhouse. 

At Halicarnassus, Mausolus remembered himself 
immensely, though in the book 
there wasn't even a sketch, 
only a picture of huge fragments. 
In the pyramid's deep clockworks, 
did the narrow tunnels mount toward 
the eye of God? That was the year 

photos were beamed back from space; 
falling asleep I used to repeat a new word 
to myself, telemetry, liking the way 
it seemed to allude to something storied. 
The earth was whorled marble, 
at that distance. Even the stuck-on porticoes 
and collonades downtown were narrative, 

somehow, but the buildings my father engineered 
were without stories. All I wanted 
was something larger than our ordinary sadness -- 
greater not in scale but in context, 
memorable, true to a proportioned, 
subtle form. Last year I knew a student, 
a half mad boy who finally opened his arms 

with a razor, not because he wanted to die 
but because he wanted to design something grand 
on his own body. Once he said, When a child 
realizes his parents aren't enough,
he turns to architecture. 
I think I know what he meant. 
Imagine the Masons parading, 

one of them, in his splendid get-up, 
striding forward with the golden staff, 
above his head Cheops' beautiful shape -- 
a form we cannot separate 
from the stories about the form, 
even if we hardly know them, 
even if it no longer signifies, if it only shines.

 A Clock stopped --
Not the Mantel's --
Geneva's farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing --
That just now dangled still --

An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain --
Then quivered out of Decimals --
Into Degreeless Noon --

It will not stir for Doctors --
This Pendulum of snow --
This Shopman importunes it --
While cool -- concernless No --

Nods from the Gilded pointers --
Nods from the Seconds slim --
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life --
And Him --

 I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

 HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997

“Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.”
—Hart Crane, “Voyages”

“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven't opened,
where night is reflected through decades of glass.
There is the nursery, there is the nanny,
there are my father’s unreachable eyes
turned towards the window. Is the child uneasy?
His is the death that is circling the stars.

In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly
and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,
three of us are watching, one of us is staring
with the wide gaze of a wild, wave-fed seal.
Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves,
and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass.
We wait outside time, while night collects courage
around us. The vigil is wordless. And you

watch the longest, move the farthest, besieged by your breath,
pulling into your body. You stare towards your death,
head arched on the pillow, your left fingers curled.
Your mouth sucking gently, unmoved by these hours
and their vigil of salt spray, you show us how far
you are going, and how long the long minutes are,
while spiralling night watches over the room
and takes you, until you watch us in turn.

Lions speak their own language. You are still breathing.
Here is release. Here is your pillow,
cool like a handkerchief pressed in a pocket.
Here is your white tousled long growing hair.
Here is a kiss on your temple to hold you
safe through your solitude’s long steady war;
here, you can go. We will stay with you,
keeping the silence we all came here for. 

Night, take his left hand, turning the pages.
Spin with the windows and doors that he mended.
Spin with his answers, patient, impatient.
Spin with his dry independence, his arms
warmed by the needs of his family, his hands
flying under the wide, carved gold ring, and the pages
flying so his thought could fly. His breath slows,
lending its edges out to the night.

Here is his open mouth. Silence is here
like one more new question that he will not answer. 
A leaf is his temple. The dark is the prayer.
He has given his body; his hand lies above
the sheets in a symbol of wholeness, a curve
of thumb and forefinger, ringed with wide gold, 
and the instant that empties his breath is a flame 
faced with a sudden cathedral's new stone.

 To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

 In nineteen hundred forty-nine
China was won by Mao Tse-tung
Chiang Kai-shek's army ran away
They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday

Supported by the CIA
Pushing junk down Thailand way

First they stole from the Meo Tribes
Up in the hills they started taking bribes
Then they sent their soldiers up to Shan
Collecting opium to send to The Man

Pushing junk in Bangkok yesterday
Supported by the CIA

Brought their jam on mule trains down
To Chiang Rai that's a railroad town
Sold it next to the police chief brain
He took it to town on the choochoo train

Trafficking dope to Bangkok all day
Supported by the CIA

The policeman's name was Mr. Phao
He peddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. A.I.D.

The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA

He got so sloppy & peddled so loose
He busted himself & cooked his own goose
Took the reward for an opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold

Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA

Touby Lyfong he worked for the French
A big fat man liked to dine & wench
Prince of the Meos he grew black mud
Till opium flowed through the land like a flood

Communists came and chased the French away
So Touby took a job with the CIA

The whole operation fell in to chaos
Till U.S. Intelligence came into Laos
I'll tell you no lie I'm a true American
Our big pusher there was Phoumi Nosovan

All them Princes in a power play
But Phoumi was the man for the CIA

And his best friend General Vang Pao
Ran the Meo army like a sacred cow
Helicopter smugglers filled Long Cheng's bars
In Xieng Quang province on the Plain of Jars

It started in secret they were fighting yesterday
Clandestine secret army of the CIA

All through the Sixties the Dope flew free
Thru Tan Son Nhut Saigon to Marshal Ky
Air America followed through
Transporting confiture for President Thieu

All these Dealers were decades and yesterday
The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA

Operation Haylift Offisir Wm. Colby
Saw Marshal Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me
Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks
"Hitchhiking" with dope pushers was how he got his fix

Subsidizing traffickers to drive the Reds away
Till Colby was the head of the CIA


 January 1972

 There was an apple tree in the yard --
this would have been
forty years ago -- behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts --
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

 Would ‘any woman’ find me difficult to live with?

My tastes are simple: space for several thousand books,

The smoke from my pipe stuffed with aromatic Balkan Sobranie, 

A leftover from the Sixties, frequent brief absences to fulfil

My duties as a carer, unending phone calls

And the unenviable reputation as England’s worst or best complainer,

"Treading on toes or keeping people on their toes"

Also a warm and welcoming vagina, an insatiable need

For ******** and cunnilingus, a bed with clean sheets

I can retire to by five with a hot water bottle 

To calm my churning viscera while I read 

Endless analytic texts, tomes of French poems to translate,

A notorious weekly newsletter to edit, a quarterly to write reviews for

And – I must confess – cable TV so I can access Starsky and Hutch. 

I need a cottage in Haworth to go with the wife,

Companion or whatever, to see with me the changing

Seasons of heather from purple September glory

To the browns of winter and wisps of summer green

And meet with Michael Haslam, fellow poet,

Maestro of the moors and shape-shifter supreme.

I write these verses sitting in the marble hall

Of City Station’s restored art deco glory,

The rats and debris of decades swept away,

How much I need the kindness of strangers,

The welcome from my son’s nurses on the 

Ward with the highest security rating Leeds possesses,

A magnificent rotunda among lawns and wooded glades,

Air conditioned with more staff than patients-

When visiting times are readily extended to encompass

My moorland walks and journeys to the capital

When I visit Brenda Williams, England’s leading protest poet.

In an Eden garden which spreads its lawned sleeves

To envelop my tobacco smoke which irritates everyone 

Or is it a displacement onto the smoker

As I ecstasise the red and yellow splendour of the red hot poker

Defiantly erect among the flowering robes of magnolia?

Here we reminisce of long ago days when our children

Blossomed with talent and showed no signs 

Of the unending torment of their adult years,

Depot injections, Red clouds which whirl as in end-on sections, absconding,

Liasing, losing and finding…

 “Remember, you loved me, when we were young, one day”



The words of the song in Tauber’s mellifluous tenor

Haunt my nights and days, make me tremble when I hear

Your voice on the phone, sadden me when I can’t make into your smile

The pucker of your lips, the gleam in your eye.



The day we met is with me still, you asked directions

And on the way we chatted. You told me how you’d left

Lancashire for Leeds, went to the same TC as me, even liked poetry

Both were looking for an ‘interesting evening class’

Instead we found each other.

You took me back for tea to the flat in Headingley

You shared with two other girls. The class in Moortown

Was a disaster. Walking home in the rain I put my arm

Around you and you did not resist, we shared your umbrella

Then we kissed.



I liked the taste of your lips, the tingle of your fingertips,

Your mild perfume. When a sudden gust blew your umbrella inside out

We sheltered underneath a cobbled arch, a rainy arch, a rainbow arch.



“I’m sorry”, you said about nothing in particular, perhaps the class

Gone wrong, the weather, I’ll never know but there were tears in your eyes

But perhaps it was just the rain. We kissed again and I felt

Your soft breasts and smelt the hair on your neck and I was lost to you

And you to me perhaps, I’ll never know.



We went to plays, I read my poems aloud in quiet places,

I met your mother and you met mine. We quarrelled over stupid things.

When my best friend seduced you I blamed him and envied him

And tried to console you when you cried a whole day through.



The next weekend I had the flu and insisted you came to look after me

In my newly-rented bungalow. Out of the blue I said, “What you did for him

You can do for me”. It was not the way our first and only love-making

Should have been, you guilty and regretful, me resentful and not tender.

When I woke I saw you in the half-light naked, curled and innocent

I truly loved you If I’d proposed you might have agreed, I’ll never know.

A month later you were pregnant and I was not the father.

I wanted to help you with the baby, wanted you to stay with me

So I could look after you and be there for the birth but your mind

Was set elsewhere end I was too immature to understand or care.



When I saw you again you had Sarah and I had Brenda, my wife-to-be;

Three decades of nightmare ahead with neither of our ‘adult children’

Quite right, both drink to excess and have been on wards.

Nor has your life been a total success, full-time teaching till you retired

Then Victim Support: where’s that sharp mind, that laughter and that passion?



And what have I to show?

A few pamphlets, a small ‘Selected’, a single good review.

Sat in South Kensington on the way to the Institut I wrote this,

Too frightened even to phone you.

 he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed 
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,"not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he'll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he's been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off..." 
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom 
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn't eat, he
wouldn't touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn't go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to 
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn't work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I'd had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough 
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me. 
"you can make it," I said to him. 
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn't want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up. 
you know the rest: now he's better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left... 
and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!" 
but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?" 
"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!" 
I shake the cat, hold him up in 
the smoky and drunken light, he's relaxed he knows... 
it's then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together. 
he too knows it's ******** but that somehow it all helps.