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Best Famous Dungarees Poems

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

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Darkies

“I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid”. Hattie McDaniel.

I’m the savage in the jungle
and the busboy in the town.
I’m the one who jumps the highest
when the Boss man comes around.

I’m the maid who wields the wooden broom.
I’m the black boot polish cheeks.
I’m the big fat Lawdy Mama
who always laughs before she speaks.

I’m the plaintive sound of spirituals
on the mighty Mississip’.
I’m the porter in the club car
touching forelock for a tip.

I’m the bent, white-whiskered ol’ Black Joe
with the stick and staggered walk.
I’m the barefoot boy in dungarees
with a stammer in my talk.

I’m the storytelling Mr. Bones
with a jangling tambourine.
I’m the North’s excuse for novelty
and the South’s deleted scene.

I’m the one who takes his lunch break
with the extras and the grips.
I’m the funny liquorice coils of hair
and the funny looking lips.

I’m the white wide eyes and pearly teeth.
I’m the jet black skin that shines.
I’m the soft-shoe shuffling Uncle Tom
for your nickels and your dimes.

I’m the Alabami Mammy
for a state I’ve never seen.
I’m the bona fide Minstrel Man
whose blackface won’t wash clean.

I’m the banjo playing Sambo
with a fixed and manic grin.
I’m the South’s defiant answer
that the Yankees didn’t win.

I’m the inconvenient nigrah
that no one can let go.
I’m the cutesy picaninny
with my hair tied up in bows.

I’m the funny little shoeshine boy.
I’m the convict on the run;
the ****** in the woodpile
when the cotton pickin’s done.

I’m a blacklist in Kentucky.
I’m the night when hound dogs bay.
I’m the cut-price, easy light relief
growing darker by the day.

I’m the “yessir, Massa, right away”
that the audience so enjoys.
I’m the full-grown man of twenty-five
but still they call me ‘boy’.

For I’m the myth in Griffith’s movie.
I’m the steamboat whistle’s cry.
I’m the dust of dead plantations
and the proof of Lincoln’s lie.

I’m the skin upon the leg iron.
I’m the blood upon the club.
I’m the deep black stain you can’t erase
no matter how you scrub.

John Lindley

Written by Frank O'Hara |

The Lover

He waits and it is not without
a great deal of trouble that he tickles
a nightingale with his guitar.

He would like to cry Andiamo!
but alas! no one has arrived
yet although the dew is perfect

for adieux. How bitterly he beats
his hairy chest! because he is
a man sitting out an indignity.

The mean moon is like a nasty
little lemon above the ubiquitous
snivelling fir trees and if there's

a swan within a radius of
twelve square miles let's
throttle it. We too are worried.

He is a man like us erect
in the cold dark night. Silence
handles his guitar as clumsily

as a wet pair of dungarees.
The grass if full of snakespit.
He alone is hot admist the stars.

If no one is racing towards him
down intriguingly hung stairways 
towards the firm lamp of his thighs 

we are indeed in trouble sprawling
feet upwards to the sun our faces
growing smaller in the colossal dark.

Written by Heather McHugh |

Ghoti

 The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence--
if not lexical, at least
phonetic; if not with Madonna

then at least with Mary Magdalene.
Instead we get the sheer
opacity of things: an accident
of incident, a tracery of history: the dung

inside the dungarees, the jock strap for a codpiece, and
the ruined patches bordering the lip. One boot (high-heeled) could make
Sorrento sorry, Capri corny, even little Italy
a little ill. Low-cased, a lover looks

one over--eggs without ease, semen without oars--
and there, on board, tricked out in fur and fin,
the landlubber who wound up captain. Where's it going,
this our (H)MS? More west? More forth? The quest

itself is at a long and short behest: it's wound
in winds. (Take rough from seas, and women from the shore,
unmentionables out of mind). We're here
for something rich, beyond

appearances. What do I mean? (What can one say?)
A minute of millenium, unculminating
stint, a stonishment: my god, what's
utterable? Gargah, gatto, goat. Us animals is made

to seine and trawl and drag and gaff
our way across the earth. The earth, it rolls.
We dig, lay lines, book arguably
perfect passages. But earth remains untranslated,

unplumbed. A million herring run where we
catch here a freckle, there a pock; the depths to which things live
words only glint at. Terns in flight work up
what fond minds might

call syntax. As for that
semantic antic in the distance, is it
whiskered fish, finned cat? Don't settle
just for two. Some bottomographies are

brooded over, and some skies swum through. . .