10 Best Famous Delicacy Poems

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

• All Famous Delicacy Poems

 Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving hendecasyllables,
and an old love of encyclopedias
and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory,
and an incurable nostalgia for the Latin,
and bits of memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the loss of memory of names and dates,
and the cult of the East, which the varied peoples
of the teeming East do not themselves share,
and evening trembling with hope or expectation,
and the disease of entymology,
and the iron of Anglo-Saxon syllables,
and the moon, that always catches us by surprise,
and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires,
and the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes,
and chocolate, oh Mexican delicacy,
and a few coins and an old hourglass,
and that an evening, like so many others,
be given over to these lines of verse.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- 
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees 
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. 
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, 
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of 
your enumerations! 
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam- 
ilies shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives 
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, 
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the 
watermelons? 

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old 
grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator 
and eyeing the grocery boys. 
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed 
the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my 
Angel? 
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of 
cans following you, and followed in my imagination 
by the store detective. 
We strode down the open corridors together in 
our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every 
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. 
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors 
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point 
tonight? 
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the 
supermarket and feel absurd.) 
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? 
The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, 
we'll both be lonely. 
Will we stroll dreaming ofthe lost America of love 
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent 
cottage? 
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage- 
teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit 
poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank 
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black 
waters of Lethe? 

 This year,
I'm raising the emotional ante,
putting my face
in the leaves to be stepped on,
seeing myself among them, that is;
that is, likening
leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh,
the passage of a leaf in autumn
to the passage of autumn,
branch-tip and winter spaces
to possibilities, and possibility
to God. Even on East 61st Street
in the blowzy city of New York,
someone has planted a gingko
because it has leaves like fans like hands,
hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely
Chinese hands on the sidewalks
so far from delicacy
or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko--
do we see them?
No one ever treated us so gently
as these green-going-to-yellow hands
fanned out where we walk.
No one ever fell down so quietly
and lay where we would look
when we were tired or embarrassed,
or so bowed down by humanity
that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble,
and looked down not to look up
until something looked like parts of people
where we were walking. We have no
experience to make us see the gingko
or any other tree,
and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall
and outlives us,
we look away, or look at the middles of things,
which would not be our way
if we truly thought we were gods.

 The artichoke 
With a tender heart 
Dressed up like a warrior, 
Standing at attention, it built 
A small helmet 
Under its scales 
It remained 
Unshakeable, 
By its side 
The crazy vegetables 
Uncurled 
Their tendrills and leaf-crowns, 
Throbbing bulbs, 
In the sub-soil 
The carrot 
With its red mustaches 
Was sleeping, 
The grapevine 
Hung out to dry its branches 
Through which the wine will rise, 
The cabbage 
Dedicated itself 
To trying on skirts, 
The oregano 
To perfuming the world, 
And the sweet 
Artichoke 
There in the garden, 
Dressed like a warrior, 
Burnished 
Like a proud 
Pomegrante. 
And one day 
Side by side 
In big wicker baskets 
Walking through the market 
To realize their dream 
The artichoke army 
In formation. 
Never was it so military 
Like on parade. 
The men 
In their white shirts 
Among the vegetables 
Were 
The Marshals 
Of the artichokes 
Lines in close order 
Command voices, 
And the bang 
Of a falling box. 

But 
Then 
Maria 
Comes 
With her basket 
She chooses 
An artichoke, 
She's not afraid of it. 
She examines it, she observes it 
Up against the light like it was an egg, 
She buys it, 
She mixes it up 
In her handbag 
With a pair of shoes 
With a cabbage head and a 
Bottle 
Of vinegar 
Until 
She enters the kitchen 
And submerges it in a pot. 

Thus ends 
In peace 
This career 
Of the armed vegetable 
Which is called an artichoke, 
Then 
Scale by scale, 
We strip off 
The delicacy 
And eat 
The peaceful mush 
Of its green heart.

 Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet has so many imitators.
I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the decolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!

And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even creme de la creme.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may grace a king's table.

We have a yellow bowl near the toaster
where summer's butter grows
soft and sentimental.
We love it better for its weeping,
its nostalgia for buckets and churns
and deep stone wells,
for the press of a wooden butter mold
shaped like a swollen heart.

 Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame 
That at the whisper of Love's name, 
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise 
Your angry head and stand at gaze? 

Poor bombard-captain, sworn to reach 
The ravelin and effect a breach-- 
Indifferent what you storm or why, 
So be that in the breach you die! 

Love may be blind, but Love at least 
Knows what is man and what mere beast; 
Or Beauty wayward, but requires 
More delicacy from her squires. 

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast 
Could be your staunchness at the post, 
When were you made a man of parts 
To think fine and profess the arts? 

Will many-gifted Beauty come 
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb, 
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown? 
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!

 Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
 roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch 
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
-- Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
 just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is wholly autumn: in the late
Afternoon as I walked toward the ridge where the hills
 begin,
There is a whir, a thrashing in the bush, and a startled
 pheasant, flying out and up,
Suddenly astonished me, breaking the waking dream.

Last night
Snatches of sleep, streaked by dreams and half dreams
- So that, aloft in the dim sky, for almost an hour,
A sausage balloon - chalk-white and lifeless looking--
 floated motionless
Until, at midnight, I went to New Bedlam and saw what I
 feared
 the most - I heard nothing, but it
 had all happened several times elsewhere.

Now, in the cold glittering morning, shining at the
 window,
The pears hang, yellowed and over-ripe, sodden brown in
 erratic places, all bunched and dangling,
Like a small choir of bagpipes, silent and waiting. And I
 rise now,
Go to the window and gaze at the fallen or falling country
-- And see! -- the fields are pencilled light brown 
 or are the dark brownness of the last autumn
-- So much has shrunken to straight brown lines, thin as
 the
 bare thin trees,
Save where the cornstalks, white bones of the lost forever dead,
Shrivelled and fallen, but shrill-voiced when the wind
 whistles,
Are scattered like the long abandoned hopes and ambitions 
Of an adolescence which, for a very long time, has been
 merely
A recurrent target and taunt of the inescapable mockery of
 memory.

 The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line
Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,
Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,
Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter
To delicacy, to poise) but that they
Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.
Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato
Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly
Superior page; the blunt stone also.

"Calendar of an Invisible April"
Translation from Greek: Marios Dikaiakos


"The wind was wistling continuously, it was 
getting darker, and that distant voice was 
incessantly reaching my ears : "an entire life"...
"an entire life"...
On the opposite wall, the shadows of the 
trees were playing cinema"

----------------


"It seems that somewhere people are celebrating;
although there are no houses or human beings
I can listen to guitars and other laughters which
are not nearby

Maybe far away, within the ashes of heavens
Andromeda, the Bear, or the Virgin...

I wonder; is loneliness the same, all over the
worlds ? "

----------------

"Almond-shaped, elongated eyes, lips; perfumes stemming
from a premature sky of great feminine delicacy
and fatal drunkeness.

I leant on my side -almost fell- onto the
hymns to the Virgin and the cold of spacious
gardens.

Prepared for the worst." 

Pureness of pale moon, loneness of far skies,
Splendour of starry regions & bright sun,
Grandeur of universal vastnesses,

Sweetness of flower, staunchness of stalwart tree,
Delicacy of small verdures ev’ry one,
Loveliness of all lowly forms that be,

Gladness of ev’ry bird that gaily sings,
Ardour of eager beasts that hunt & kill,
Rapture of all life-raptur’d living things;

Yea man’s one rapture too & his life’s joy,
His strength, his beauty & his living will,
Each soul’s will to create & to destroy,—

O thou who visitest these dwellings, why
Thus deignest thou, who art so great & high?