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Best Famous Petroleum Poems

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

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Written by Ted Hughes | Create an image from this poem

Work and Play

 The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
 But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust
 In shimmering exhaust
 Searching to slake
 Its fever in ocean
 Will play and be idle or else it will bust. 

The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,
Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect.
 But the serpent of cars that collapsed on the beach
 Disgorges its organs
 A scamper of colours
 Which roll like tomatoes
 Nude as tomatoes
 With sand in their creases
 To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech. 

The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.
 But the holiday people
 Are laid out like wounded
 Flat as in ovens
 Roasting and basting
 With faces of torment as space burns them blue
 Their heads are transistors
 Their teeth grit on sand grains
 Their lost kids are squalling
 While man-eating flies
 Jab electric shock needles but what can they do? 

They can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces
 And start up the serpent
 And headache it homeward
 A car full of squabbles
 And sobbing and stickiness
 With sand in their crannies
 Inhaling petroleum
 That pours from the foxgloves
 While the evening swallow
The swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,
Touches the honey-slow river and turning
Returns to the hand stretched from under the eaves -
A boomerang of rejoicing shadow.


Written by Donald Hall | Create an image from this poem

The Alligator Bride

 The clock of my days winds down.
The cat eats sparrows outside my window.
Once, she brought me a small rabbit
which we devoured together, under
the Empire Table
while the men shrieked
repossessing the gold umbrella.

Now the beard on my clock turns white.
My cat stares into dark corners
missing her gold umbrella.
She is in love
with the Alligator Bride.

Ah, the tiny fine white
teeth! The Bride, propped on her tail
in white lace
stares from the holes
of her eyes. Her stuck-open mouth
laughs at minister and people.

On bare new wood
fourteen tomatoes,
a dozen ears of corn,
six bottles of white wine,

a melon,
a cat,
broccoli
and the Alligator Bride.

The color of bubble gum,
the consistency of petroleum jelly,
wickedness oozes
from the palm of my left hand.
My cat licks it.
I watch the Alligator Bride.

Big houses like shabby boulders
hold themselves tight
in gelatin.
I am unable to daydream.
The sky is a gun aimed at me.
I pull the trigger.
The skull of my promises
leans in a black closet, gapes
with its good mouth
for a teat to suck.

A bird flies back and forth
in my house that is covered by gelatin
and the cat leaps at it
missing. Under the Empire Table
the Alligator Bride
lies in her bridal shroud.
My left hand
leaks on the Chinese carpet.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry