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Best Famous Fiddle With Poems

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

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Written by C K Williams | Create an image from this poem

Tar

 The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, 
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.
I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrow- ingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shim- mers and mirages.
Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it, we'd understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an at- mosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Sus- quehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, cling- ing like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.


Written by Ellis Parker Butler | Create an image from this poem

A Study In Feeling

 To be a great musician you must be a man of moods,
You have to be, to understand sonatas and etudes.
To execute pianos and to fiddle with success, With sympathy and feeling you must fairly effervesce; It was so with Paganini, Remenzi and Cho-pang, And so it was with Peterkin Von Gabriel O’Lang.
Monsieur O’Lang had sympathy to such a great degree.
No virtuoso ever lived was quite so great as he; He was either very happy or very, very sad; He was always feeling heavenly or oppositely bad; In fact, so sympathetic that he either must enthuse Or have the dumps; feel ecstacy or flounder in the blues.
So all agreed that Peterkin Von Gabriel O’Lang Was the greatest violinist in the virtuoso gang.
The ladies bought his photographs and put them on the shelves In the place of greatest honor, right beside those of themselves; They gladly gave ten dollars for a stiff backed parquette chair.
And sat in mouth-wide happiness a-looking at his hair.
I say “a looking at his hair,” I mean just what I say, For no one ever had a chance to hear P.
O’Lang play; So subtle was his sympathy, so highly strung was he, His moods were barometric to the very last degree; The slightest change of weather would react upon his brain, And fill his soul with joyousness or murder it with pain.
And when his soul was troubled he had not the heart to play.
But let his head droop sadly down in such a soulful way, That every one that saw him declared it was worth twice (And some there were said three times) the large admission price; And all were quite unanimous and said it would be crude For such a man to fiddle when he wasn’t in the mood.
But when his soul was filled with joy he tossed his flowing hair And waved his violin-bow in great circles in the air; Ecstaticly he flourished it, for so his spirit thrilled, Thus only could he show the joy with which his heart was filled; And so he waved it up and down and ’round and out and in,— But he never, never, NEVER touched it to his violin!

Book: Reflection on the Important Things