10 Best Famous Erie Poems

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

• All Famous Erie Poems

 On the Erie Canal, it was,
All on a summer's day,
I sailed forth with my parents
Far away to Albany.

From out the clouds at noon that day
There came a dreadful storm,
That piled the billows high about,
And filled us with alarm.

A man came rushing from a house,
Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray,
Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,
Snub up while yet you may."

Our captain cast one glance astern,
Then forward glanced he,
And said, "My wife and little ones
I never more shall see."

Said Dollinger the pilot man,
In noble words, but few,--
"Fear not, but lean on Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

The boat drove on, the frightened mules
Tore through the rain and wind,
And bravely still, in danger's post,
The whip-boy strode behind.

"Come 'board, come 'board," the captain cried,
"Nor tempt so wild a storm;"
But still the raging mules advanced,
And still the boy strode on.

Then said the captain to us all,
"Alas, 'tis plain to me,
The greater danger is not there,
But here upon the sea.

So let us strive, while life remains,
To save all souls on board,
And then if die at last we must,
Let . . . . I cannot speak the word!"

Said Dollinger the pilot man,
Tow'ring above the crew,
"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

"Low bridge! low bridge!" all heads went down,
The laboring bark sped on;
A mill we passed, we passed church,
Hamlets, and fields of corn;
And all the world came out to see,
And chased along the shore
Crying, "Alas, alas, the sheeted rain,
The wind, the tempest's roar!
Alas, the gallant ship and crew,
Can nothing help them more?"

And from our deck sad eyes looked out
Across the stormy scene:
The tossing wake of billows aft,
The bending forests green,
The chickens sheltered under carts
In lee of barn the cows,
The skurrying swine with straw in mouth,
The wild spray from our bows!

"She balances!
She wavers!
Now let her go about!
If she misses stays and broaches to,
We're all"--then with a shout,]
"Huray! huray!
Avast! belay!
Take in more sail!
Lord, what a gale!
Ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule's tail!"
"Ho! lighten ship! ho! man the pump!
Ho, hostler, heave the lead!

"A quarter-three!--'tis shoaling fast!
Three feet large!--t-h-r-e-e feet!--
Three feet scant!" I cried in fright
"Oh, is there no retreat?"

Said Dollinger, the pilot man,
As on the vessel flew,
"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
And he will fetch you through."

A panic struck the bravest hearts,
The boldest cheek turned pale;
For plain to all, this shoaling said
A leak had burst the ditch's bed!
And, straight as bolt from crossbow sped,
Our ship swept on, with shoaling lead,
Before the fearful gale!

"Sever the tow-line! Cripple the mules!"
Too late! There comes a shock!
Another length, and the fated craft
Would have swum in the saving lock!

Then gathered together the shipwrecked crew
And took one last embrace,
While sorrowful tears from despairing eyes
Ran down each hopeless face;
And some did think of their little ones
Whom they never more might see,
And others of waiting wives at home,
And mothers that grieved would be.

But of all the children of misery there
On that poor sinking frame,
But one spake words of hope and faith,
And I worshipped as they came:
Said Dollinger the pilot man,--
(O brave heart, strong and true!)--
"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,
For he will fetch you through."

Lo! scarce the words have passed his lips
The dauntless prophet say'th,
When every soul about him seeth
A wonder crown his faith!

And count ye all, both great and small,
As numbered with the dead:
For mariner for forty year,
On Erie, boy and man,
I never yet saw such a storm,
Or one't with it began!"

So overboard a keg of nails
And anvils three we threw,
Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks,
Two hundred pounds of glue,
Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat,
A box of books, a cow,
A violin, Lord Byron's works,
A rip-saw and a sow.

A curve! a curve! the dangers grow!
"Labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so!--
Hard-a-port, Dol!--hellum-a-lee!
Haw the head mule!--the aft one gee!
Luff!--bring her to the wind!"

For straight a farmer brought a plank,--
(Mysteriously inspired)--
And laying it unto the ship,
In silent awe retired.

Then every sufferer stood amazed
That pilot man before;
A moment stood. Then wondering turned,
And speechless walked ashore.

 Homage Kenneth Koch


If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
 scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
 the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly
 Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge
 out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
 Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
 Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
 the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
 & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
 Aeon till it came out clean

 Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for 
a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in 
it.
I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there 
are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.
This house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen 
panes of glass,
And somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.
It needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed 
and tied;
But what it needs the most of all is some people living inside.
If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid
I'd put a gang of men to work with brush and saw and spade.
I'd buy that place and fix it up the way it used to be
And I'd find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free.
Now, a new house standing empty, with staring window 
and door,
Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the 
store.
But there's nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and lone
For the lack of something within it that it has never known.
But a house that has done what a house should do,
a house that has sheltered life,
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up his stumbling 
feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone, that ever your eyes 
could meet.
So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back,
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen 
apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken 
heart.

 (a) radical

ban all fires
and places where people congregate
to create comfort
put an end to sleep
good cooking
and the delectation of wine
tear lovers apart
piss on the sun and moon
degut all heavenly harmony
strike out across the bitter ice
and the poisonous marshes

make (if you dare) a better world

(b) expect poison from standing water
  (iii)
lake erie
why not as a joke one night
pick up your bed and walk
to washington – sleep
your damned sleep in its streets
so that one bright metallic morning
it can wake up to the stench
and fermentation of flesh
the gutrot of nerves – the blood’s
green effervescence so active
your skin has a job to keep it all in

isn’t that what things with the palsy
are supposed to do – lovely lake
give the world the miracle it waits for
what a laugh that would be

especially if washington lost its temper
and screamed christ lake erie
i don’t even know what to do
with my own garbage

pollution is just one of those things

go on lake erie
do it tonight

(c) drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead

(i)
isn't the next one
easter egg

  i don't want to live any more in an old way

yes it is

  to be a socialist wearing capitalism's cap
  a teacher in the shadow of a dead headmaster
  a tree using somebody else's old sap

  i want to build my future out of new emotions
  to seek more than my own in a spring surround
  to move amongst people keen to move outwards
  putting love and ideas into fresh ground

  who will come with me across this border
  not anywhere but in the bonds we make
  taking the old apart to find new order
  living ourselves boldly for each other's sake

then love is

  if you ask me today what love is
  i should have to name the people i love
  and perhaps because it's spring
  and i cannot control the knife that's in me
  their names would surprise me as much as you

  for years i have assumed that love is bloody
  a thing locked up in house and a family tree
  but suddenly its ache goes out beyond me
  and the first love is greater for the new

  this year more than any other
  the winter has savaged my deepest roots
  and the easter sun is banging hard against the window
  the arms of my loves are flowering widely
  and over the fields a new definition is running

  even though the streets we walk cannot be altered
  and faces there are that will not understand
  we have a sun born of our mutual longings
  whose shine is a hard fact - love is a new land

new spartans

  i haven't felt this young for twenty years
  yesterday i felt twenty years older
  then i had the curtains drawn over recluse fears
  today the sun comes in and instantly it's colder

  must shave and get dressed - i'm being nagged
  to shove my suspicions in a corner and get out
  what use the sun if being plagued with new life
  i can't throw off this centrally-heated doubt

  accept people with ice in their brows
  are the new spartans - they wait
      shall i go with them
  indoor delights that slowly breed into lies
  need to be dumped out of doors - and paralysis with them

no leave it
there's still one more
the need now

  the need now is to chronicle new times
  by their own statutes not as ***-ends of the old
  ideas stand out bravely against the surrounding grey
  seeking their own order in what themselves proclaim
  fortresses no longer belong by right to an older day

  i want to gather in my hands things i believe in
  not to be told that other rules prevail - there is
  a treading forward to be done of great excitement
  and people to be found who by the old laws
  should be little more than dead
      this enlightment

  is cutting like spring into a bitter winter
  and there is this smashing of many concrete shells
  a dream with the cheek to be aggressive has assumed
  its own flesh and bone and will not put up with sleep
  as its prime condition - life out of death is exhumed

it's the other side
is so disappointing
no thanks
leave it for now

(ii)

there follows a brief interlude in honour of mr vasko popa
(the yugoslav poet who in a short visit to this country
has stayed a long time)
and it will not now take place

  this game is called x
  no one else can play

  when the game is over
  we have all joined in

  those who have not been playing
  have to give in an ear

  if you don't have an ear
  use one of those lying about

  left over from the last time
  the game wasn't played

  this game is not to do with ears
  shooting must be done from the heart

  x sits in the middle of the ring - he
  has gone for a stroll up his left nostril

  how can he seize a left-over ear
  and drag it under the ground

  hands up if you have been shot from the heart
  x comes up in the middle of himself

  in this way the game is over before
  it began and everyone willy-nilly

  has had to go home
  before he could put a foot outside


(d) enough! – or too much

   reading popa
   i let fly
   too many words

   i bang away
   at the seed
   but can’t break it

   hurt i turn to
   constructing
   castles with cards

   if you can’t split
   the atom
   man stop writing

 The day comes slowly in the railyard 
behind the ice factory. It broods on 
one cinder after another until each 
glows like lead or the eye of a dog 
possessed of no inner fire, the brown 
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle 
a moment and sighing lets it thud 
down on the loading dock. In no time 
the day has crossed two sets of tracks, 
a semi-trailer with no tractor, and crawled 
down three stories of the bottling plant 
at the end of the alley. It is now 
less than five hours until mid-day 
when nothing will be left in doubt, 
each scrap of news, each banished carton, 
each forgotten letter, its ink bled of lies, 
will stare back at the one eye that sees 
it all and never blinks. But for now 
there is water settling in a clean glass 
on the shelf beside the razor, the slap 
of bare feet on the floor above. Soon 
the scent of rivers borne across roof 
after roof by winds without names, 
the aroma of opened beds better left 
closed, of mouths without teeth, of light 
rustling among the mice droppings 
at the back of a bin of potatoes. 

* 

The old man who sleeps among the cases 
of empty bottles in a little nest of rags 
and newspapers at the back of the plant 
is not an old man. He is twenty years 
younger than I am now putting this down 
in permanent ink on a yellow legal pad 
during a crisp morning in October. 
When he fell from a high pallet, his sleeve 
caught on a nail and spread his arms 
like a figure out of myth. His head 
tore open on a spear of wood, and he 
swore in French. No, he didn't want 
a doctor. He wanted toilet paper 
and a drink, which were fetched. He used 
the tiny bottle of whisky to straighten 
out his eyes and the toilet paper to clean 
his pants, fouled in the fall, and he did 
both with seven teenage boys looking on 
in wonder and fear. At last the blood 
slowed and caked above his ear, and he 
never once touched the wound. Instead, 
in a voice no one could hear, he spoke 
to himself, probably in French, and smoked 
sitting back against a pallet, his legs 
thrust out on the damp cement floor. 

* 

In his white coveralls, crisp and pressed, 
Teddy the Polack told us a fat tit 
would stop a toothache, two a headache. 
He told it to anyone who asked, and grinned -- 
the small eyes watering at the corners -- 
as Alcibiades might have grinned 
when at last he learned that love leads 
even the body beloved to a moment 
in the present when desire calms, the skin 
glows, the soul takes the light of day, 
even a working day in 1944. 
For Baharozian at seventeen the present 
was a gift. Seeing my ashen face, 
the cold sweats starting, he seated me 
in a corner of the boxcar and did 
both our jobs, stacking the full cases 
neatly row upon row and whistling 
the songs of Kate Smith. In the bathroom 
that night I posed naked before the mirror, 
the new cross of hair staining my chest, 
plunging to my groin. That was Wednesday, 
for every Wednesday ended in darkness. 

* 

One of those teenage boys was my brother. 
That night as we lay in bed, the lights 
out, we spoke of Froggy, of how at first 
we thought he would die and how little 
he seemed to care as the blood rose 
to fill and overflow his ear. Slowly 
the long day came over us and our breath 
quieted and eased at last, and we slept. 
When I close my eyes now his bare legs 
glow before me again, pure and lovely 
in their perfect whiteness, the buttocks 
dimpled and firm. I see again the rope 
of his sex, unwrinkled, flushed and swaying, 
the hard flat belly as he raises his shirt 
to clean himself. He gazes at no one 
or nothing, but seems instead to look off 
into a darkness I hadn't seen, a pool 
of shadow that forms before his eyes, 
in my memory now as solid as onyx. 

* 

I began this poem in the present 
because nothing is past. The ice factory, 
the bottling plant, the cindered yard 
all gave way to a low brick building 
a block wide and windowless where they 
designed gun mounts for personnel carriers 
that never made it to Korea. My brother 
rises early, and on clear days he walks 
to the corner to have toast and coffee. 
Seventeen winters have melted into an earth 
of stone, bottle caps, and old iron to carry 
off the hard remains of Froggy Frenchman 
without a blessing or a stone to bear it. 
A little spar of him the size of a finger, 
pointed and speckled as though blood-flaked, 
washed ashore from Lake Erie near Buffalo 
before the rest slipped down the falls out 
into the St. Lawrence. He could be at sea, 
he could be part of an ocean, by now 
he could even be home. This morning I 
rose later than usual in a great house 
full of sunlight, but I believe it came 
down step by step on each wet sheet 
of wooden siding before it crawled 
from the ceiling and touched my pillow 
to waken me. When I heave myself 
out of this chair with a great groan of age 
and stand shakily, the three mice still 
in the wall. From across the lots 
the wind brings voices I can't make out, 
scraps of song or sea sounds, daylight 
breaking into dust, the perfume of waiting 
rain, of onions and potatoes frying.

 AS consequent from store of summer rains, 
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing, 
Or many a herb-lined brook’s reticulations, 
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea, 
Songs of continued years I sing.

Life’s ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend, 
With the old streams of death.) 

Some threading Ohio’s farm-fields or the woods, 
Some down Colorado’s cañons from sources of perpetual snow, 
Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa, 
Some to Atlantica’s bays, and so to the great salt brine. 

In you whoe’er you are my book perusing, 
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing, 
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

Currents for starting a continent new, 
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, 
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves, 
(Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous’d and ominous too, 
Out of the depths the storm’s abysmic waves, who knows whence?
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d sail.) 

Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring, 
A windrow-drift of weeds and shells. 

O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless, 
Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity’s music faint and far, 
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim, strains for the soul of the prairies, 
Whisper’d reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding, 
Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable, 
Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,) 
These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry, 
Wash’d on America’s shores?

 ON Forty First Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.

If houses went on crutches
this house would be
one of the cripples.

A sign on the house:
Church of the Living God
And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.

From a Greek coffee house
Across the street
A cabalistic jargon
Jabbers back.
 And men at tables
 Spill Peloponnesian syllables
 And speak of shovels for street work.
 And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad
 At Painted Post, Horse’s Head, Salamanca.

 A FOREFINGER of stone, dreamed by a sculptor, points to the sky.
It says: This way! this way!

Four lions snore in stone at the corner of the shaft.
They too are the dream of a sculptor.
They too say: This way! this way!

The street cars swing at a curve.
The middle-class passengers witness low life.
The car windows frame low life all day in pictures.

Two Italian cellar delicatessens
 sell red and green peppers.
The Florida bananas furnish a burst of yellow.
The lettuce and the cabbage give a green.

Boys play marbles in the cinders.
The boys’ hands need washing.
The boys are glad; they fight among each other.

A plank bridge leaps the Lehigh Valley railroad.
Then acres of steel rails, freight cars, smoke,
And then … the blue lake shore
…Erie with Norse blue eyes … and the white sun.

 SOMEBODY’S little girl—how easy to make a sob story over who she was once and who she is now.
Somebody’s little girl—she played once under a crab-apple tree in June and the blossoms fell on the dark hair.

It was somewhere on the Erie line and the town was Salamanca or Painted Post or Horse’s Head.
And out of her hair she shook the blossoms and went into the house and her mother washed her face and her mother had an ache in her heart at a rebel voice, “I don’t want to.”

Somebody’s little girl—forty little girls of somebodies splashed in red tights forming horseshoes, arches, pyramids—forty little show girls, ponies, squabs.
How easy a sob story over who she once was and who she is now—and how the crabapple blossoms fell on her dark hair in June.

Let the lights of Broadway spangle and splatter—and the taxis hustle the crowds away when the show is over and the street goes dark.
Let the girls wash off the paint and go for their midnight sandwiches—let ’em dream in the morning sun, late in the morning, long after the morning papers and the milk wagons—
Let ’em dream long as they want to … of June somewhere on the Erie line … and crabapple blossoms.