Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Magenta Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Magenta poems, articles about Magenta poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Magenta poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

Leaving Early

 Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.
When you kick me out, that's what I'll remember,
Me, sitting here bored as a loepard
In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,
Velvet pillows the color of blood pudding
And the white china flying fish from Italy.
I forget you, hearing the cut flowers
Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,
Pitchers and Coronation goblets
Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries
Bow down, a local constellation,
Toward their admirers in the tabletop:
Mobs of eyeballs looking up.
Are those petals of leaves you've paried with them ---
Those green-striped ovals of silver tissue?
The red geraniums I know.
Friends, friends. They stink of armpits
And the invovled maladies of autumn,
Musky as a lovebed the morning after.
My nostrils prickle with nostalgia.
Henna hags:cloth of your cloth.
They tow old water thick as fog.

The roses in the Toby jug
Gave up the ghost last night. High time.
Their yellow corsets were ready to split.
You snored, and I heard the petals unlatch,
Tapping and ticking like nervous fingers.
You should have junked them before they died.
Daybreak discovered the bureau lid 
Littered with Chinese hands. Now I'm stared at
By chrysanthemums the size
Of Holofernes' head, dipped in the same
Magenta as this fubsy sofa.
In the mirror their doubles back them up.
Listen: your tenant mice
Are rattling the cracker packets. Fine flour
Muffles their bird feet: they whistle for joy.
And you doze on, nose to the wall.
This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.
How did we make it up to your attic?
You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.
We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers?


Written by Sylvia Plath | Create an image from this poem

The Swarm

 Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!

Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off

In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.

It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.

The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!
Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.

The bees argue, in their black ball,
A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,

Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom! Pom! They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!

The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.

How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles --
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom! Pom! 'They would have killed me.'

Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor,
A black intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe! O ton of honey!
Written by Amy Clampitt | Create an image from this poem

A Hermit Thrush

 Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day, 
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up 
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked 
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us 
back, year after year, lugging the 
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming 
seas, the gales of yet another winter
may have done. Still there,

the gust-beleaguered single spruce tree, 
the ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass 
and clover tuffet underneath it, 
edges frazzled raw

but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding. 
Whatever moral lesson might commend itself, 
there's no use drawing one, 
there's nothing here

to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue 
(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or 
any no-more-than-human tendency—
stubborn adherence, say,

to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to 
hold on in any case means taking less and less 
for granted, some few things seem nearly 
certain, as that the longest day

will come again, will seem to hold its breath, 
the months-long exhalation of diminishment 
again begin. Last night you woke me
for a look at Jupiter,

that vast cinder wheeled unblinking
in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled
toward an apprehension all but impossible
to be held onto—

that no point is fixed, that there's no foothold
but roams untethered save by such snells, 
such sailor's knots, such stays
and guy wires as are

mainly of our own devising. From such an 
empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as

in the end untenable. Base as it is, from 
year to year the earth's sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with

thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry's cool poultice—

and what can't finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk's-cowl overcast,

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a 
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or 
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there's

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this 
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.
Written by John Betjeman | Create an image from this poem

Sun and Fun

 I walked into the night-club in the morning; 
There was kummel on the handle of the door.
The ashtrays were unemptied.
The cleaning unattempted, 
And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor.

I pulled aside the thick magenta curtains
-So Regency, so Regency, my dear –
And a host of little spiders
Ran a race across the ciders
To a box of baby ‘pollies by the beer.

Oh sun upon the summer-going by-pass
Where ev’rything is speeding to the sea, 
And wonder beyond wonder
That here where lorries thunder
The sun should ever percolate to me.

When Boris used to call in his Sedanca, 
When Teddy took me down to his estate
When my nose excited passion, 
When my clothes were in the fashion, 
When my beaux were never cross if I was late, 

There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches, 
There was fun enough for far into the night.
But I’m dying now and done for, 
What on earth was all the fun for? 
For I’m old and ill and terrified and tight.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Bridge Over The Aire Book 6

 THE WALK TO THE PARADISE GARDENS



1



Bonfire Night beckoned us to the bridge

By Saint Hilda’s where we started down

Knostrop to chump but I trailed behind

With Margaret when it was late September

The song of summer ceased and fires in

Blackleaded grates began and we were

Hidden from the others by the bridge’s span.

2



When you bent I saw the buds of your breasts

As you meant and I laughed at your craft when

You blushed and denied and finally cried

But there was a smile in your eyes.





3



It was the season of yo-yo’s in yellow or

Pink or pillar-box red and you spooled out

The thread as only you could and it dipped

And rose like a dancer.





4



The paddock by the tusky sheds was cropped

And polished by the horses’ hooves, their

Nostrils flared and they bared their teeth

As we passed and tossed their manes as we

Shied from the rusty fence where peg-legged

We jumped the cracks and pulled away each

Dandelion head, “Pee-the-bed! Pee-the bed!”

Rubbing the yellow dust into each other’s

Cheeks and chins as we kissed.





5



The bluebells had died and on the other side

The nettle beds were filled with broken branches

White as bone, clouds were tags of wool, the

Night sky magenta sands with bands of gold

And bright stars beckoned and burned like

Ragged robins in a ditch and rich magnolias

In East End Park.





6



I am alone in the dark

Remembering Bonfire Night

Of nineteen-fifty four

When it was early dusk

Your hair was gold

As angels’ wings.





7



From the binyard in the backstreet we brought

The dry stored branches, broken staves under

The taunting stars and we have never left

That night or that place on the Hollows

The fire we built has never gone out and

The light in your eyes is bright:

We took the road by the river with a star

Map and dream sacks on our backs.



8



The Hollows stretched into darkness

The fire burned in the frost, sparks

Crackled and jumped and floated

Stars into the invisible night and

The log glowed red and the fire we

Fed has never died.







9



The catherine-wheel pinned to the palings

Hissed and spun as we ran passed the railings

Rattling our sticks until the stars had beat retreat.





10



From the night comes a figure

Into the firelight: Margaret Gardiner

My first, my only love, the violet pools

Of your eyes, your voice still calling,

“I am here, I am waiting.”





11



Where the road turns

Past St Hilda’s

Down Knostrop

By the Black Road

By the Red Road

Interminable blue

And I remember you,

Margaret, in your

Mauve blazer standing

By the river, your

Worn-out flower patterned

Frock and black

Laceless runners





12



Into the brewer’s yard

Stumbled the drayhorses

Armoured in leather

And clashing brass

Strident as Belshazzar’s

Feast, rich as yeast

On Auntie Nellie’s

Baking board, barrels

Banked on barrels

From the cooper’s yard.





13



Margaret, are you listening?

Are your eyes still distant

And dreaming? Can you hear

My voice in Eden?

My poems are all for you

The one who never knew

Silent and most generous

Muse, eternal primavera

Under the streetlamps

Of Leeds Nine.





14



Margaret, hold my hand

As we set out into the

Land of summers lost

A day-time ghost surrenders

At the top of the steps

To the Aire where we

Looked over the Hollows

Misted with memory and

Images of summer.

We are standing on the corner of Falmouth Place

We are standing by the steps to the Aire

We are standing outside the Maypole

Falling into Eden.





15



Falling into Eden is just a beginning

Hoardings on the gable ends for household

Soap, washing is out on the lines

Falmouth Street full of children playing,

Patrick Keown, Keith Ibbotson, the Flaherty

Twins spilling over the pavements, holding

A skipping rope, whirling and twirling;

Margaret you never missed a turn

While I could never make one, out before I began.


Written by Denise Levertov | Create an image from this poem

Triple Feature

 Innocent decision: to enjoy.
And the pathos
of hopefulness, of his solicitude:

--he in mended serape,
she having plaited carefully
magenta ribbons into her hair,
the baby a round half-hidden shape
slung in her rebozo, and the young son steadfastly
gripping a fold of her skirt,
pale and severe under a handed-down sombrero --
all regarding 
the stills with full attention, preparing
to pay ad go in--
to worlds of shadow-violence, half-
familiar, warm with popcorn, icy
with strange motives, barbarous splendors!
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Hymn

 How I love the working-class girls of Leeds,

Their mile-wide smiles, eyes bright as beads,

Their young breasts bobbing as they run,

Hands quick as darting fish, lithe legs

Bare as they scramble over the Hollows

With brown-soled feet and dimpled bums

Half-covered with knickers, and short frocks

Full of flowers and their delicate ears,

Perfect teeth and flickering tongues, the

Fragile bones of their cheeks, the soft

Sweetness of their soprano voices dying

Away into the unforgotten magenta and

Yellow-ochre of innumerable twilights.
Written by Amy Clampitt | Create an image from this poem

Vacant Lot With Pokeweed

 Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing—and look! here's

a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry