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Best Famous Enact Poems

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

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Written by Marilyn Hacker | Create an image from this poem

Scars on Paper

 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.

Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn't or in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
statistically a survivor (that
is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.

She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
but transatlantic schedules intervened.
She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride,
the wary elders whom she taught to read,
— herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde,
with thirty years to live.
And I happened
to open up The Nation to that bad
news which I otherwise might not have known
(not breast cancer: cancer of the brain).
Words take the absent friend away again.
Alone, I think, she called, alone, upon
her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.

The pain and fear some courage extinguished
at disaster's denouement come back
daily, banal: is that brownish-black
mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
between my chest and armpit when I washed
rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache?
I'm not yet desperate enough to take
comfort in being predeceased: the anguish
when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer,
die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's
dean succumbs "after brief illness" to cancer.
I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries
with wide-paced dates, candles in jars, whose tallow
glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow.

Aglow in summer evening, a desk-lamp's yellow
moonlight peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts,
while an aging woman thinks of sex
in the present tense. Desire may follow,
urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow
with wine and ripe black figs: a proof, the next
course, a simple question, the complex
response, a burning sweetness she will swallow.
The opening mind is sexual and ready
to embrace, incarnate in its prime.
Rippling concentrically from summer's gold
disc, desire's iris expands, steady
with blood beat. Each time implies the next time.
The aging woman hopes she will grow old.

The aging woman hopes she will grow old.
A younger woman has a dazzling vision
of bleeding wrists, her own, the clean incisions
suddenly there, two open mouths. They told
their speechless secrets, witnesses not called
to what occurred with as little volition
of hers as these phantom wounds.
Intense precision
of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled
by mine in ranks where now I'm "being brave"
if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd
sunbathing, or demonstrating for Dyke Pride.
Her bravery counters the kitchen knives'
insinuation that the scars be made.
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

"With, or despite our scars, we stayed alive
until the Contras or the Government
or rebel troops came, until we were sent
to 'relocation camps' until the archives
burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave
beside the aspen grove where adolescent
boys used to cut class, until we went
to the precinct house, eager to behave
like citizens..."
I count my hours and days,
finger for luck the word-scarred table which
is not my witness, shares all innocent
objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement
door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.


Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

Nature assigns the Sun --

 Nature assigns the Sun --
That -- is Astronomy --
Nature cannot enact a Friend --
That -- is Astrology.
Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

The look of thee what is it like

 The look of thee, what is it like
Hast thou a hand or Foot
Or Mansion of Identity
And what is thy Pursuit?

Thy fellows are they realms or Themes
Hast thou Delight or Fear
Or Longing -- and is that for us
Or values more severe?

Let change transfuse all other Traits
Enact all other Blame
But deign this least certificate --
That thou shalt be the same.
Written by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope | Create an image from this poem

Parabola

 Year after year the princess lies asleep 
Until the hundred years foretold are done, 
Easily drawing her enchanted breath. 
Caught on the monstrous thorns around the keep, 
Bones of the youths who sought her, one by one 
Rot loose and rattle to the ground beneath.

But when the Destined Lover at last shall come, 
For whom alone Fortune reserves the prize 
The thorns give way; he mounts the cobwebbed stair 
Unerring he finds the tower, the door, the room, 
The bed where, waking at his kiss she lies 
Smiling in the loose fragrance of her hair.

That night, embracing on the bed of state, 
He ravishes her century of sleep 
And she repays the debt of that long dream; 
Future and Past compose their vast debate; 
His seed now sown, her harvest ripe to reap 
Enact a variation on the theme.

For in her womb another princess waits, 
A sleeping cell, a globule of bright dew. 
Jostling their way up that mysterious stair, 
A horde of lovers bursts between the gates, 
All doomed but one, the destined suitor, who 
By luck first reaches her and takes her there.

A parable of all we are or do! 
The life of Nature is a formal dance 
In which each step is ruled by what has been 
And yet the pattern emerges always new 
The marriage of linked cause and random chance 
Gives birth perpetually to the unforeseen.

One parable for the body and the mind: 
With science and heredity to thank 
The heart is quite predictable as a pump, 
But, let love change its beat, the choice is blind. 
'Now' is a cross-roads where all maps prove blank, 
And no one knows which way the cat will jump.

So here stand I, by birth a cross between 
Determined pattern and incredible chance,
Each with an equal share in what I am. 
Though I should read the code stored in the gene, 
Yet the blind lottery of circumstance 
Mocks all solutions to its cryptogram.

As in my flesh, so in my spirit stand I 
When does this hundred years draw to its close? 
The hedge of thorns before me gives no clue. 
My predecessor's carcass, shrunk and dry, 
Stares at me through the spikes. Oh well, here goes! 
I have this thing, and only this, to do.
Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

The Battle fought between the Soul

 The Battle fought between the Soul
And No Man -- is the One
Of all the Battles prevalent --
By far the Greater One --

No News of it is had abroad --
Its Bodiless Campaign
Establishes, and terminates --
Invisible -- Unknown --

Nor History -- record it --
As Legions of a Night
The Sunrise scatters -- These endure --
Enact -- and terminate --


Written by Robert Seymour Bridges | Create an image from this poem

Low Barometer

 The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the packed
Pollution and remorse of Time,
Slipped from oblivion re-enact
The horrors of unhousehold crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer
Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,
Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair
Or burst the locked forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interred
Escape from hallowing control,
Pale charnel forms - nay even have heard
The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn has crossed
The dolorous dark, or Earth has wound
Closer her storm-spread cloak, and thrust
The baleful phantoms underground.
Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

Dramas Vitallest Expression is the Common Day

 Drama's Vitallest Expression is the Common Day
That arise and set about Us --
Other Tragedy

Perish in the Recitation --
This -- the best enact
When the Audience is scattered
And the Boxes shut --

"Hamlet" to Himself were Hamlet --
Had not Shakespeare wrote --
Though the "Romeo" left no Record
Of his Juliet,

It were infinite enacted
In the Human Heart --
Only Theatre recorded
Owner cannot shut --

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry