Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Modelling Poems

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

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

See Also:
Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever

 To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass, 

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches, 

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah - 

If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass? 

They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti; 

archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America. 

Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi, 

likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy. 

More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume. 

Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals. 

Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself. 

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less. 

To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour. 

Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness. 

Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment, 

shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool! 

Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence. 

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts, 

to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees, 

to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.


Written by Philip Levine | Create an image from this poem

Then

 A solitary apartment house, the last one 
before the boulevard ends and a dusty road 
winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor 
through the dusty windows Karen beholds 
the elegant couples walking arm in arm 
in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, 
and she is waiting for a particular young man 
whose name I cannot now recall, if name 
he ever had. She runs the thumb of her left hand 
across her finger tips and feels the little tags 
of flesh the needle made that morning at work 
and wonders if he will feel them. She loves her work, 
the unspooling of the wide burgundy ribbons 
that tumble across her lap, the delicate laces, 
the heavy felts for winter, buried now that spring 
is rising in the trees. She recalls a black hat 
hidden in a deep drawer in the back of the shop. 
She made it in February when the snows piled 
as high as her waist, and the river stopped at noon, 
and she thought she would die. She had tried it on, 
a small, close-fitting cap, almost nothing, 
pinned down at front and back. Her hair tumbled 
out at the sides in dark rags. When she turned 
it around, the black felt cupped her forehead 
perfectly, the teal feathers trailing out behind, 
twin cool jets of flame. Suddenly he is here. 
As she goes to the door, the dark hat falls back 
into the closed drawer of memory to wait 
until the trees are bare and the days shut down 
abruptly at five. They touch, cheek to cheek, 
and only there, both bodies stiffly arched apart. 
As she draws her white gloves on, she can smell 
the heat rising from his heavy laundered shirt, 
she can almost feel the weight of the iron 
hissing across the collar. It's cool out, he says, 
cooler than she thinks. There are tiny dots 
of perspiration below his hairline. What a day 
for strolling in the park! Refusing the chair 
by the window, he seems to have no time, 
as though this day were passing forever, 
although it is barely after two of a late May 
afternoon a whole year before the modern era. 
Of course she'll take a jacket, she tells him, 
of course she was planning to, and she opens her hands, 
the fingers spread wide to indicate the enormity 
of his folly, for she has on only a blouse, 
protection against nothing. In the bedroom 
she considers a hat, something dull and proper 
as a rebuke, but shaking out her glowing hair 
she decides against it. The jacket is there, 
the arms spread out on the bed, the arms 
of a dressed doll or a soldier at attention 
or a boy modelling his first suit, my own arms 
when at six I stood beside my sister waiting 
to be photographed. She removes her gloves 
to feel her balled left hand pass through the silk 
of the lining, and then her right, fingers open. 
As she buttons herself in, she watches 
a slow wind moving through the planted fields 
behind the building. She stops and stares. 
What was that dark shape she saw a moment 
trembling between the sheaves? The sky lowers, 
the small fat cypresses by the fields' edge 
part, and something is going. Is that the way 
she too must take? The world blurs before her eyes 
or her sight is failing. I cannot take her hand, 
then or now, and lead her to a resting place 
where our love matters. She stands frozen 
before the twenty-third summer of her life, 
someone I know, someone I will always know.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry