Best Famous Martian Poems

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

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Written by Allen Ginsberg | Create an image from this poem

Nagasaki Days

 I -- A Pleasant Afternoon

 for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup


One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
 tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
 words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest -- the wild wind blew thru
 blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
 Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion's Club lunchwagon microwave
 mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
 Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
 out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
 & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
 tent flapped happily open spacious & didn't fall down.


 June 18, 1978


II -- Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
 over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
 -- am I going to stop that?

 *

Rocky Mountains rising behind us
 Denver shining in morning light
-- Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

 *

Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
 to the greyhaired Sheriff's van -- 
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
 Come back!


III -- Golden Courthouse

Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
 Prisoners, witnesses, Police -- 
the stenographer yawns into her palms.

 August 9, 1978


IV -- Everybody's Fantasy

I walked outside & the bomb'd
 dropped lots of plutonium
 all over the Lower East Side
There weren't any buildings left just
 iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to 
 stinking sewer waters

There were people starving and crawling
 across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
 Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the 
 waters

Charred Amazon palmtrees for
 hundreds of miles on both sides
 of the river

 August 10, 1978


V -- Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant

"Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!"
 the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
 -- whap!

 *

A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall!
 "Life is fragile. Handle with care" --
My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
 triggers.


 August 17, 1978


VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born

 Summer 1978

Written by Craig Raine | Create an image from this poem

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

 Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings --

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
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