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Best Famous Prickle Poems

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

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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 Louise Gluck | Create an image from this poem

Labor Day

 Requiring something lovely on his arm
Took me to Stamford, Connecticut, a quasi-farm,
His family's; later picking up the mammoth
Girlfriend of Charlie, meanwhile trying to pawn me off
On some third guy also up for the weekend.
But Saturday we still were paired; spent
It sprawled across that sprawling acreage
Until the grass grew limp
with damp. Like me. Johnston-baby, I can still see
The pelted clover, burrs' prickle fur and gorged
Pastures spewing infinite tiny bells. You pimp.
Written by Vernon Scannell | Create an image from this poem

A Case Of Murder

 They should not have left him there alone, 
Alone that is except for the cat. 
He was only nine, not old enough 
To be left alone in a basement flat, 
Alone, that is, except for the cat. 
A dog would have been a different thing, 
A big gruff dog with slashing jaws, 
But a cat with round eyes mad as gold, 
Plump as a cushion with tucked-in paws--- 
Better have left him with a fair-sized rat! 
But what they did was leave him with a cat. 
He hated that cat; he watched it sit, 
A buzzing machine of soft black stuff, 
He sat and watched and he hated it, 
Snug in its fur, hot blood in a ****, 
And its mad gold stare and the way it sat 
Crooning dark warmth: he loathed all that. 
So he took Daddy's stick and he hit the cat. 
Then quick as a sudden crack in glass 
It hissed, black flash, to a hiding place 
In the dust and dark beneath the couch, 
And he followed the grin on his new-made face, 
A wide-eyed, frightened snarl of a grin, 
And he took the stick and he thrust it in, 
Hard and quick in the furry dark. 
The black fur squealed and he felt his skin 
Prickle with sparks of dry delight. 
Then the cat again came into sight, 
Shot for the door that wasn't quite shut, 
But the boy, quick too, slammed fast the door: 
The cat, half-through, was cracked like a nut 
And the soft black thud was dumped on the floor. 
Then the boy was suddenly terrified 
And he bit his knuckles and cried and cried; 
But he had to do something with the dead thing there. 
His eyes squeezed beads of salty prayer 
But the wound of fear gaped wide and raw; 
He dared not touch the thing with his hands 
So he fetched a spade and shovelled it 
And dumped the load of heavy fur 
In the spidery cupboard under the stair 
Where it's been for years, and though it died 
It's grown in that cupboard and its hot low purr 
Grows slowly louder year by year: 
There'll not be a corner for the boy to hide 
When the cupboard swells and all sides split 
And the huge black cat pads out of it.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

An Evening With John Heath-stubbs

 Alone in Sutton with Fynbos my orange cat

A long weekend of wind and rain drowning

The tumultuous flurry of mid-February blossom

A surfeit of letters to work through, a mountain

Of files to sort, some irritation at the thought

Of travelling to Kentish Town alone when

My mind was flooded with the mellifluous voice

Of Heath-Stubbs on tape reading ‘The Divided Ways’

In memory of Sidney Keyes.



“He has gone down into the dark cellar

To talk with the bright faced Spirit with silver hair

But I shall never know what word was spoken there.”



The best reader of the century, if not the best poet.

Resonant, mesmeric, his verse the anti-type of mine,

Classical, not personal, Apollonian not Dionysian

And most unconfessional but nonetheless a poet

Deserving honour in his eighty-fifth year.



Thirty people crowded into a room

With stacked chairs like a Sunday School

A table of pamphlets looked over but not bought

A lacquered screen holding court, a century’s junk.

An ivory dial telephone, a bowl of early daffodils

To focus on.



I was the first to read, speaking of James Simmons’ death,

My anguish at the year long silence from his last letter

To the Christmas card in Gaelic Nollaig Shona -

With the message “Jimmy’s doing better than expected.”

The difficulty I had in finding his publisher’s address -

Salmon Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare -

Then a soft sad Irish woman’s voice explained

“Jimmy’s had a massive stroke, phone Janice

At The Poet’s House.”





I looked at the letter I would never end or send.

“Your poems have a strength and honesty so rare.

The ability to render character as deftly as a painter.

Your being out-of-fashion shows just how bad things are

Your poetry so easy to enjoy and difficult to forget.

Like Yeats. ‘The Dawning of the Day’ so sad

And eloquent and memorable: I read it aloud

And felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle

An unflinching bitter rhetoric straight out

Hence the neglect. Your poem about Harrison.



“He has to feel the Odeons sell

Tickets to damned souls, that Dante’s Hell

Is in that red-plush darkness.”



Echoed in Roy Fisher's letter, “Once Harrison and I

Were best mates until fame went to his head.”

James, your ‘Love Leads Me into Danger’

Set off my own despair but restored me

Just as quickly with your sense of beauty’s muted dance.

“passing Dalway’s Bawn

where the chestnuts are, the first trees to go rusty,

old admirals drowned in their own gold braid.”



The scattered alliterations mimic so exquisitely

The random pattern of fallen conkers,

The sense of innocence not wholly clear

The guilt never entirely spent.



‘The Road to Clonbarra’, a poem for the homecoming

After a wedding, the breathlessness of new beginning.

Your own self questioning, “My fourth and last chance marriage,”

Your passionate confessions of failure and plea for absolution

“His thunder storms were in the late night bars.

Home was too hard too dry and far the stars.”



You were so urgent to hear my thoughts on your book

And once too often you were out of luck,

Heath-Stubbs nodded his old sad head.

“Simmons was my friend. I’d no idea he was dead.”

Before I could finish the poem John Rety interrupted

“Can you hurry? There’s others waiting for their turn!”

I muttered to my self, but kept my temper, just...



Eventually Heath-Stubbs began - poet, teacher, wit, raconteur and man

Of letters - littering his poems with references

To three kinds of Arabic genie

The class system of ancient Egypt

The pub architecture of the Edwardian era.

From the back row I strained to see his face.

The craggy jaw, the mane of long white hair.

The bowl of daffodils I’d focused on before.



He spoke but could not read and

Like me had no single poem by heart.

In his stead a man and woman read:

I could forgive the man’s inability to pronounce ‘Dionysian’

But when he read ‘hover’ as ‘haver’

My temper began to frazzle

The woman simpered and ruined every line

As if by design, I took some amitryptilene

And let my mind float free.

‘For Barry, instead of a Christmas card, this elegy

I wrote last week. Fond wishes. Jeremy..’



“So often, David, I still meet

Your benefactor from the time:

her speedwell-blue eyes, blue like yours,





with recollection, while we talk

through leaf-fall, with its mosaic

mottling the toad-spotted wet street.”



I looked at Heath-Stubbs’ face, his sightless eyes,

And in a second understood what Gascoyne meant

“Now the light of a prism has flashed like a bird down the dark-blue,

At the end of which mountains of shadow pile up beyond sight

Oh radiant prism

A wing has been torn and its feathers drift scattered by flight.”

Book: Reflection on the Important Things