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Best Famous Pulleys Poems

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

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Written by Marge Piercy | Create an image from this poem

What Are Big Girls Made Of?

 The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh 
of bone and sinew 
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe. 
She is manufactured like a sports sedan. 
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned 
every decade. 
Cecile had been seduction itself in college. 
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel, 
her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed 
in the dark red lipstick of desire. 

She visited in '68 still wearing skirts 
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick, 
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt, 
lipstick pale as apricot milk, 
hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear, 
I thought in my superiority of the moment, 
whatever has happened to poor Cecile? 
She was out of fashion, out of the game, 
disqualified, disdained, dis- 
membered from the club of desire. 

Look at pictures in French fashion 
magazines of the 18th century: 
century of the ultimate lady 
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting. 
Paniers bring her hips out three feet 
each way, while the waist is pinched 
and the belly flattened under wood. 
The breasts are stuffed up and out 
offered like apples in a bowl. 
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper 
never meant for walking. 
On top is a grandiose headache: 
hair like a museum piece, daily 
ornamented with ribbons, vases, 
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full 
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy 
of a hairdresser turned loose. 
The hats were rococo wedding cakes 
that would dim the Las Vegas strip. 
Here is a woman forced into shape 
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh: 
a woman made of pain. 

How superior we are now: see the modern woman 
thin as a blade of scissors. 
She runs on a treadmill every morning, 
fits herself into machines of weights 
and pulleys to heave and grunt, 
an image in her mind she can never 
approximate, a body of rosy 
glass that never wrinkles, 
never grows, never fades. She 
sits at the table closing her eyes to food 
hungry, always hungry: 
a woman made of pain. 

A cat or dog approaches another, 
they sniff noses. They sniff asses. 
They bristle or lick. They fall 
in love as often as we do, 
as passionately. But they fall 
in love or lust with furry flesh, 
not hoop skirts or push up bras 
rib removal or liposuction. 
It is not for male or female dogs 
that poodles are clipped 
to topiary hedges. 

If only we could like each other raw. 
If only we could love ourselves 
like healthy babies burbling in our arms. 
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed 
to need what is sold us. 
Why should we want to live inside ads? 
Why should we want to scourge our softness 
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting? 
Why should we punish each other with scorn 
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?

When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?


Written by Erica Jong | Create an image from this poem

For an Earth-Landing

 the sky sinks its blue teeth
into the mountains.

Rising on pure will

(the lurch & lift-off,
the sudden swing
into wide, white snow),

I encourage the cable.

Past the wind
& crossed tips of my skis
& the mauve shadows of pines
& the spoor of bears
& deer,

I speak to my fear,

rising, riding,
finding myself

the only thing
between snow & sky,

the link
that holds it all together.

Halfway up the wire,
we stop,
slide back a little
(a whirr of pulleys).

Astronauts circle above us today
in the television blue of space.

But the thin withers of alps
are waiting to take us too,
& this might be the moon!

We move!

Friends, this is a toy
merely for reaching mountains

merely
for skiing down.

& now we're dangling
like charms on the same bracelet

or upsidedown tightrope people
(a colossal circus!)

or absurd winged walkers,
angels in animal fur,

with mittened hands waving
& fear turning

& the mountain
like a fisherman,

reeling us all in.

So we land
on the windy peak,
touch skis to snow,
are married to our purple shadows,
& ski back down
to the unimaginable valley

leaving no footprints.
Written by Emile Verhaeren | Create an image from this poem

The Wind

Crossing the infinite length of the moorland,
Here comes the wind,
The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November;
Endless and infinite, crossing the downs,
Here comes the wind
That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember;
Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns,
The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!


Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards,
Each bucket and pulley, it creaks and it wails;
By cisterns of farmyards, the pulleys and pails
They creak and they cry,
The whole of sad death in their melancholy.


The wind, it sends scudding dead leaves from the birches
Along o'er the water, the wind of November,
The savage, fierce wind;
The boughs of the trees for the birds' nests it searches,
To bite them and grind.
The wind, as though rasping down iron, grates past,
And, furious and fast, from afar combs the cold
And white avalanches of winter the old.
The savage wind combs them so furious and fast.
The wind of November.


From each miserable shed
The patched garret-windows wave wild overhead
Their foolish, poor tatters of paper and glass.
As the savage, fierce wind of November doth pass!
And there on its hill
Of dingy and dun-coloured turf, the black mill,
Swift up from below, through the empty air slashing,
Swift down from above, like a lightning-stroke flashing,
The black mill so sinister moweth the wind.
The savage, fierce wind of November!


The old, ragged thatches that squat round their steeple,
Are raised on their roof-poles, and fall with a clap,
In the wind the old thatches and pent-houses flap,
In the wind of November, so savage and hard.
The crosses—and they are the arms of dead people—
The crosses that stand in the narrow churchyard
Fall prone on the sod
Like some great flight of black, in the acre of God.


The wind of November!
Have you met him, the savage wind, do you remember?
Did he pass you so fleet,
—Where, yon at the cross, the three hundred roads meet—
With distressfulness panting, and wailing with cold?
Yea, he who breeds fears and puts all things to flight,
Did you see him, that night
When the moon he o'erthrew—when the villages, old
In their rot and decay, past endurance and spent,
Cried, wailing like beasts, 'neath the hurricane bent?


Here comes the wind howling, that heralds dark weather,
The wind blowing infinite over the heather.
The wind with his trumpet that heralds November!
Written by Robinson Jeffers | Create an image from this poem

Bixbys Landing

 They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
 here in an iron car
On a long cable; here the ships warped in
And took their loads from the engine, the water
 is deep to the cliff. The car
Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,
Stationed like a north star above the peaks of
 the redwoods, iron perch
For the little red hawks when they cease from
 hovering
When they've struck prey; the spider's fling of a
 cable rust-glued to the pulleys.
The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude
Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the
 rose-tipped stone-crop, the constant
Ocean's voices, the cloud-lighted space.
The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the
 rust of the broken boiler
Quick lizards lighten, and a rattle-snake flows
Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled
 fire-brick. In the rotting timbers
And roofless platforms all the free companies
Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild
 buckwheat blooms in the fat
Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.
Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung
 nest are the voice of the headland.
Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,
Men's failures are often as beautiful as men's
 triumphs, but your returnings
Are even more precious than your first presence.
Written by Richard Wilbur | Create an image from this poem

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World

 The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
 soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
 simple
As false dawn.
 Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
 angels.

 Some are in bed-sheets, some are
 in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
 they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
 swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
 wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
 breathing;

 Now they are flying in place,
 conveying
The terrible speed of their
 omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
 of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
 The soul shrinks

 From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
 blessed day,
And cries,
 "Oh, let there be nothing on
 earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
 steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
 heaven."

 Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
 and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
 love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
 and rises,

 "Bring them down from their ruddy
 gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
 of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
 undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
 floating
Of dark habits,
 keeping their difficult
 balance."


Written by Henry Vaughan | Create an image from this poem

Son-Days

 1 

Bright shadows of true Rest! some shoots of bliss, 
Heaven once a week; 
The next world's gladness prepossest in this; 
A day to seek; 
Eternity in time; the steps by which 
We Climb above all ages; Lamps that light 
Man through his heap of dark days; and the rich, 
And full redemption of the whole week's flight. 

2 

The Pulleys unto headlong man; time's bower; 
The narrow way; 
Transplanted Paradise; God's walking hour; 
The Cool o'th' day; 
The Creatures' _Jubilee_; God's parle with dust; 
Heaven here; Man on the hills of Myrrh, and flowers; 
Angels descending; the Returns of Trust; 
A Gleam of glory, after six-days'-showers. 

3 

The Church's love-feasts; Time's Prerogative, 
And Interest 
Deducted from the whole; The Combs, and hive, 
And home of rest. 
The milky way chalked out with suns; a clue 
That guides through erring hours; and in full story 
A taste of Heav'n on earth; the pledge, and cue 
Of a full feast: And the Out Courts of glory.
Written by Dylan Thomas | Create an image from this poem

Our Eunuch Dreams

 I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boys' limbs,
And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his moll
Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,
Strange to our solid eye,
And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;
When cameras shut they hurry to their hole
down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
Impose their shots, showing the nights away;
We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill
Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which
Shall fall awake when cures and their itch
Raise up this red-eyed earth?
Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,
The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,
Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;
The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world; the lying likeness of
Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
Loving and being loth;
The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.
This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,
Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack
The image from the plates;
And we shall be fit fellows for a life,
And who remains shall flower as they love,
Praise to our faring hearts.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things