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Best Famous Medals Poems

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Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown 
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed 
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping 
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip 
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines, 
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap 
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons 
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings, 
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.


Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

Roosters

 At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match 
from the broccoli patch,
flares,and all over town begins to catch.

Cries galore
come from the water-closet door,
from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,

where in the blue blur 
their rusting wives admire,
the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare

with stupid eyes
while from their beaks there rise
the uncontrolled, traditional cries.

Deep from protruding chests
in green-gold medals dressed,
planned to command and terrorize the rest,

the many wives 
who lead hens' lives
of being courted and despised;

deep from raw throats
a senseless order floats
all over town. A rooster gloats

over our beds
from rusty irons sheds
and fences made from old bedsteads,

over our churches 
where the tin rooster perches,
over our little wooden northern houses,

making sallies 
from all the muddy alleys,
marking out maps like Rand McNally's:

glass-headed pins,
oil-golds and copper greens,
anthracite blues, alizarins,

each one an active 
displacement in perspective;
each screaming, "This is where I live!"

Each screaming
"Get up! Stop dreaming!"
Roosters, what are you projecting?

You, whom the Greeks elected
to shoot at on a post, who struggled
when sacrificed, you whom they labeled

"Very combative..."
what right have you to give 
commands and tell us how to live,

cry "Here!" and "Here!"
and wake us here where are
unwanted love, conceit and war?

The crown of red
set on your little head
is charged with all your fighting blood

Yes, that excrescence
makes a most virile presence,
plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence

Now in mid-air
by two they fight each other.
Down comes a first flame-feather,

and one is flying,
with raging heroism defying
even the sensation of dying.

And one has fallen
but still above the town
his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;

and what he sung
no matter. He is flung
on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung

with his dead wives
with open, bloody eyes,
while those metallic feathers oxidize.


St. Peter's sin
was worse than that of Magdalen
whose sin was of the flesh alone;

of spirit, Peter's,
falling, beneath the flares,
among the "servants and officers."

Old holy sculpture
could set it all together
in one small scene, past and future:

Christ stands amazed,
Peter, two fingers raised
to surprised lips, both as if dazed.

But in between
a little cock is seen
carved on a dim column in the travertine,

explained by gallus canit;
flet Petrus underneath it,
There is inescapable hope, the pivot;

yes, and there Peter's tears
run down our chanticleer's
sides and gem his spurs.

Tear-encrusted thick
as a medieval relic
he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick,

still cannot guess
those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,
his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,

a new weathervane
on basilica and barn,
and that outside the Lateran

there would always be
a bronze cock on a porphyry
pillar so the people and the Pope might see

that event the Prince
of the Apostles long since
had been forgiven, and to convince

all the assembly
that "Deny deny deny"
is not all the roosters cry.

In the morning
a low light is floating
in the backyard, and gilding

from underneath
the broccoli, leaf by leaf;
how could the night have come to grief?

gilding the tiny
floating swallow's belly
and lines of pink cloud in the sky,

the day's preamble
like wandering lines in marble,
The cocks are now almost inaudible.

The sun climbs in,
following "to see the end,"
faithful as enemy, or friend.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Incompatabilities

 For Brenda Williams



La lune diminue; divin septembre.

Divine September the moon wanes.

 Pierre Jean Jouve



Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:

This is one September I shall not forget.



The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked

And the floors waxed, but I never shone.

The stripes of the red and black blazer

Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:

Your home had broken windows to the street.

You had the mortification of lice in your hair

While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.





Four children, an alcoholic father and

An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.

I did not make it like Alan Bennett,

Who still sends funny postcards

About our Leeds childhood.

Of your’s, you could never speak

And found my nostalgia

Wholly inappropriate.



Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling

But fear of the consequences for your mother

Had you sobbed the night’s terrors

Of your father’s drunken homecomings,

Your mother sat with the door open

In all weathers while you, the oldest,

Waited with her, perhaps

Something might have been done.



He never missed a day’s work digging graves,

Boasting he could do a six-footer

Single-handed in two hours flat.

That hackneyed phrase

‘He drank all his wages’

Doesn’t convey his nightly rages

The flow of obscenities about menstruation

While the three younger ones were in bed

And you waited with your mother

To walk the streets of Seacroft.

“Your father murdered your mother”

As Auntie Margaret said,

Should a witness

Need indicting.



Your mother’s growing cancer went diagnosed, but unremarked

Until the final days

She was too busy auxiliary nursing

Or working in the Lakeside Caf?.

It was her wages that put bread and jam

And baked beans into your stomachs.



Her final hospitalisation

Was the arena for your father’s last rage

Her fare interfering with the night’s drinking;



He fought in the Burma Campaign but won no medals.

Some kind of psychiatric discharge- ‘paranoia’

Lurked in his papers. The madness went undiagnosed

Until his sixtieth birthday. You never let me meet him

Even after our divorce.



In the end you took me on a visit with the children.

A neat flat with photographs of grandchildren,

Stacks of wood for the stove, washing hung precisely

In the kitchen, a Sunday suit in the wardrobe.

An unwrinkling of smiles, the hard handshake

Of work-roughened hands.



One night he smashed up the tidy flat.

The TV screen was powder

The clock ticked on the neat lawn

‘Murder in Seacroft Hospital’

Emblazoned on the kitchen wall.



I went with you and your sister in her car to Roundhay Wing.

Your sister had to leave for work or sleep

You had to back to meet the children from school.

For Ward 42 it wasn’t an especially difficult admission.

My first lesson: I shut one set of firedoors while the charge nurse

Bolted the other but after five minutes his revolt

Was over and he signed the paper.



The nurse on nights had a sociology degree

And an interest in borderline schizophrenia.

After lightsout we chatted about Kohut and Kernberg

And Melanie Klein. Your father was occasionally truculent,

Barricading himself in on one home leave. Nothing out of the way

For a case of that kind. The old ladies on the estate sighed,

Single men were very scarce. Always a gentleman, tipping

His cap to the ladies.

There seems to be objections in the family to poetry

Or at least to the kind that actually speaks

And fails to lie down quietly on command.

Yours seems to have set mine alight-

I must get something right.
Written by Rg Gregory | Create an image from this poem

from crossing the line

 (1) a great man

there was a great man
so great he couldn't be criticised in the light
who died
and for a whole week people turned up their collars over their ears
and wept with great gossiping

houses wore their roofs at a mournful angle
and television announcers carried their eyes around in long drooping bags
there was a hush upon the voice of the land
as soft as the shine on velvet

the whole nation stretched up into the dusty attic for its medals and black ties
 and prayers
and seriously polished its black uncomfortable shoes
and no one dared creak in the wrong places

anybody who thought he was everybody
except those who were nearly dying themselves
wanted to come to the funeral
and in its mourning the nation rejoiced to think
that once again it had cut into the world's time
with its own sick longing for the past

the great man and the great nation
had the same bulldog vision of each other's face
and neither of them had barked convincingly for a very long time

so the nation turned out on a cold bleak day
and attended its own funeral with uncanny reverence
and the other nations put tears over their laughing eyes
v-signs and rude gestures spoke with the same fingers


(2) aden

tourists dream of bombs 
that will not kill them

into the rock
the sand-claws
the winking eye
and harsh shell
of aden

waiting for the pinch

jagged sun
lumps of heat
bumping on the stunned ship
knuckledustered rock
clenched over steamer point

waiting for the sun to stagger
loaded down the hill
before we bunch ashore

calm
eyes within their windows
we walk
(a town must live
must have its acre of normality
let hate sport
its bright shirt in the shadows)
we shop
collect our duty-murdered goods
compare bargains
laugh grieve
at benefit or loss
aden dead-pan
leans against our words
which hand invisible
knows how to print a bomb
ejaculate a knife
does tourist greed embroil us in
or shelter us from guilt

backstreet
a sailor drunk
gyrates within a wall of adenese
collapses spews
they roll about him
in a dark pool

the sun moves off
as we do

streets squashed with shops
criss-cross of customers
a rush of people nightwards
a white woman
striding like a cliff
dirt - goats in the gutter
crunched beggars
a small to breed a fungus
cafes with open mouths
men like broken teeth
or way back in the dark
like tonsils

an air of shapeless threat
fluffs in our pulse
a boundary crossed
the rules are not the same
brushed by eyes
the touch is silent
silence breeds
we feel the breath of fury
(soon to roar)
retreat within our skins
return to broader streets

bazaars glower
almost at candlelight
we clutch our goods
a dim delusion of festivity
a christ neurotic
dying to explode

how much of this is aden
how much our masterpiece
all atmospheres are inbuilt

an armoured car looms by

the ship like mother
brooding in the sea
receives us with a sigh
aden winks and ogles in the dark
the sport of hate released

slowly away at midnight
rumours of bombs and riots
in the long wake
a disappointed sleep

nothing to write home about
except the heat


(3) crossing the line (xii)

  give me not england
in its glory dead nightmared with rotting seed
palmerston's perverted gunboat up the
yangtse's **** - lloyd george and winston churchill
rubbing men like salt into surly wounds
(we won those wars and neatly fucked ourselves)
eden at suez a jacked-up piece of wool
macmillan sprinkling cliches where the black
blood boils (the ashes of his kind) - home
as wan as godot (shagged by birth) wilson
for whom the wind blew sharply once or twice
sailing eastwards in the giant's stetson hat
saving jims from the red long john
   give me
not england but the world with england in it
with people as promiscuous as planes (the colours
shuffled)
 don't ask for wars to end or men
to have their deaths wrapped up as christmas gifts
expect myself to die a coward - proclaim no lives
as kisses - offer no roses to the blind
no sanctions to the damned - will not shake hands 
with him who rapes my wife or chokes my daughter
only when drunk or mad will think myself
the master of my purse - will lust for ease
seek to assuage my griefs in others' tears
will make more chaos than i put to rights

but in my fracture i shall strive to stand
a ruined arch whose limbs stretch half
towards a point that drew me upwards - that
ungot intercourse in space that prickless star
is what i ache for (what i want in man
and thus i give him)
  the image of that cross
is grit within him - the arch reflects in
microscopic waves through fleshly aeons
beaming messages to nerves and typing fingers

both ends of me are broken - in frantic storms
hanging over cliffs i fight to mend them
the job cannot be done - i die though
if i stop
 how cynical i may be (how apt
with metaphor or joke to thrust my fate
grotesquely into print) the fact is that
i live until i stop - i can't sit down then
crying let me die or death is good
(the freedom from myself my bones are seeking)

i must go on - tread every road that comes
risk every plague because i must believe
the end is bright (however filled with vomit
every brook) - if not for me then for
those who clamber on my bones
   my hope
is what i owe them - they owe their life to me
Written by Karl Shapiro | Create an image from this poem

Manhole Covers

 The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.


Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

Fuzzy-Wuzzy

 (Soudan Expeditionary Force)
We've fought with many men acrost the seas,
 An' some of 'em was brave an' some was not:
The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese;
 But the Fuzzy was the finest o' the lot.
We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im:
 'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
 An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces.
 So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
 You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
 We gives you your certificate, an' if you want it signed
 We'll come an' 'ave a romp with you whenever you're inclined.

We took our chanst among the Khyber 'ills,
 The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills,
 An' a Zulu impi dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
 Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We 'eld our bloomin' own, the papers say,
 But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us 'oller.
 Then 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' the missis and the kid;
 Our orders was to break you, an' of course we went an' did.
 We sloshed you with Martinis, an' it wasn't 'ardly fair;
 But for all the odds agin' you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.

'E 'asn't got no papers of 'is own,
 'E 'asn't got no medals nor rewards,
So we must certify the skill 'e's shown
 In usin' of 'is long two-'anded swords:
When 'e's 'oppin' in an' out among the bush
 With 'is coffin-'eaded shield an' shovel-spear,
An 'appy day with Fuzzy on the rush
 Will last an 'ealthy Tommy for a year.
 So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an' your friends which are no more,
 If we 'adn't lost some messmates we would 'elp you to deplore;
 But give an' take's the gospel, an' we'll call the bargain fair,
 For if you 'ave lost more than us, you crumpled up the square!

'E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
 An', before we know, 'e's 'ackin' at our 'ead;
'E's all 'ot sand an' ginger when alive,
 An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead.
'E's a daisy, 'e's a ducky, 'e's a lamb!
 'E's a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
'E's the on'y thing that doesn't give a damn
 For a Regiment o' British Infantree!
 So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
 You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
 An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air --
 You big black boundin' beggar -- for you broke a British square!
Written by Randall Jarrell | Create an image from this poem

Losses

 It was not dying: everybody died. 
It was not dying: we had died before 
In the routine crashes-- and our fields 
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, 
And the rates rose, all because of us. 
We died on the wrong page of the almanac, 
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; 
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend, 
We blazed up on the lines we never saw. 
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners. 
(When we left high school nothing else had died 
For us to figure we had died like.) 

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed 
The ranges by the desert or the shore, 
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores-- 
And turned into replacements and worke up 
One morning, over England, operational. 

It wasn't different: but if we died 
It was not an accident but a mistake 
(But an easy one for anyone to make.) 
We read our mail and counted up our missions-- 
In bombers named for girls, we burned 
The cities we had learned about in school-- 
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among 
The people we had killed and never seen. 
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; 
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low." 

The said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities. 

It was not dying --no, not ever dying; 
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead, 
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying? 
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"
Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

Decorations

 My only medals are the scars
I've won in weary, peacetime wars,
A-fighting for my little brood,
To win them shelter, shoon and food;
But most of all to give them faith
In God's good mercy unto death.

My sons have medals gleaming bright,
Proud trophies won in foreign fight;
But though their crosses bravely shine,
My boys can show no wounds like mine -
Grim gashes dolorously healed,
And inner ailings unrevealed.

Life-lasting has my battle been,
My enemy a fierce machine;
And I am marked by many a blow
In conflict with a tireless foe,
Till warped and bent beneath the beat
Of life's unruth I own defeat.

Yet strip me bare and you will see
A worthy warrior I be;
Although no uniform I've worn,
By wounds of labour I am torn;
Leave the their ribbands and their stars . . .
Behold! I proudly prize my scars.
Written by Randall Jarrell | Create an image from this poem

Gunner

 Did they send me away from my cat and my wife
To a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,
To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?
Did I nod in the flies of the schools?
And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,
The blood froze over my splints like a scab --
Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,
Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?
And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave,
All my wars over? How easy it was to die!
Has my wife a pension of so many mice?
Did the medals go home to my cat?
Written by Wilfred Owen | Create an image from this poem

A Terre

 (Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.)


Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

I tried to peg out soldierly -- no use!
One dies of war like any old disease.
This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.
I have my medals? -- Discs to make eyes close.
My glorious ribbons? -- Ripped from my own back
In scarlet shreds. (That's for your poetry book.)

A short life and a merry one, my brick!
We used to say we'd hate to live dead old, --
Yet now . . . I'd willingly be puffy, bald,
And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys
At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well, that's what I learnt, -- that, and making money.
Your fifty years ahead seem none too many?
Tell me how long I've got? God! For one year
To help myself to nothing more than air!
One Spring! Is one too good to spare, too long?
Spring wind would work its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.
My servant's lamed, but listen how he shouts!
When I'm lugged out, he'll still be good for that.
Here in this mummy-case, you know, I've thought
How well I might have swept his floors for ever,
I'd ask no night off when the bustle's over,
Enjoying so the dirt. Who's prejudiced
Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust,
Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn,
Less warm than dust that mixes with arms' tan?
I'd love to be a sweep, now, black as Town,
Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load?

O Life, Life, let me breathe, -- a dug-out rat!
Not worse than ours the existences rats lead --
Nosing along at night down some safe vat,
They find a shell-proof home before they rot.
Dead men may envy living mites in cheese,
Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys,
And subdivide, and never come to death,
Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth.
"I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone."
Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned;
The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.
"Pushing up daisies," is their creed, you know.
To grain, then, go my fat, to buds my sap,
For all the usefulness there is in soap.
D'you think the Boche will ever stew man-soup?
Some day, no doubt, if . . .
 Friend, be very sure
I shall be better off with plants that share
More peaceably the meadow and the shower.
Soft rains will touch me, -- as they could touch once,
And nothing but the sun shall make me ware.
Your guns may crash around me. I'll not hear;
Or, if I wince, I shall not know I wince.
Don't take my soul's poor comfort for your jest.
Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends.

My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest,
To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased
On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds.

Carry my crying spirit till it's weaned
To do without what blood remained these wounds.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry