Best Famous Quilt Poems

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

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• All Famous Quilt Poems

Written by Charlotte Bronte | Life I leave the office, take the stairs, in time to mail a letter before 3 in the afternoon--the last dispatch. The red, white and blue air mail falls past the slot for foreign mail and hits bottom with a sound that tells me my letter is alone. They will have to bring in a plane from a place of coastline and beaches, from a climate of fresh figs and apricot, to cradle my one letter. Up in the air it will leave behind some of its ugly nuance, its unpleasant habit of humanity which wants to smear itself over others: the spot in which it wasn't clear, perhaps, how to take my words, which were suggestive, the paragraph in which the names of flowers, ostensibly to indicate travel, make a bed for lovers, the parts that contain spit and phlegm, the words only a wet tongue can manage, hissing sounds and letters of the alphabet which can only be formed by biting down on the bottom lip. In the next-to-last paragraph, some hair came off in the comb. Then clothes were gathered from everywhere in the room in one sentence, and the sun rose while a door closed with sincerity. No doubt such sincerity will be judged, but first the investigation of the postmark. Am I where I was expected? Did I have at hand the right denominations of stamps, or did I make a childish quilt of ones and sevens? Ah yes, they will have to cancel me twice. Once to make my words worthless. Once more to stop me from writing.

Written by Michael Ondaatje | To A Sad Daughter All night long the hockey pictures gaze down at you sleeping in your tracksuit. Belligerent goalies are your ideal. Threats of being traded cuts and wounds --all this pleases you. O my god! you say at breakfast reading the sports page over the Alpen as another player breaks his ankle or assaults the coach. When I thought of daughters I wasn't expecting this but I like this more. I like all your faults even your purple moods when you retreat from everyone to sit in bed under a quilt. And when I say 'like' I mean of course 'love' but that embarrasses you. You who feel superior to black and white movies (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca) though you were moved by Creature from the Black Lagoon. One day I'll come swimming beside your ship or someone will and if you hear the siren listen to it. For if you close your ears only nothing happens. You will never change. I don't care if you risk your life to angry goalies creatures with webbed feet. You can enter their caves and castles their glass laboratories. Just don't be fooled by anyone but yourself. This is the first lecture I've given you. You're 'sweet sixteen' you said. I'd rather be your closest friend than your father. I'm not good at advice you know that, but ride the ceremonies until they grow dark. Sometimes you are so busy discovering your friends I ache with loss --but that is greed. And sometimes I've gone into my purple world and lost you. One afternoon I stepped into your room. You were sitting at the desk where I now write this. Forsythia outside the window and sun spilled over you like a thick yellow miracle as if another planet was coaxing you out of the house --all those possible worlds!-- and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics. I cannot look at forsythia now without loss, or joy for you. You step delicately into the wild world and your real prize will be the frantic search. Want everything. If you break break going out not in. How you live your life I don't care but I'll sell my arms for you, hold your secrets forever. If I speak of death which you fear now, greatly, it is without answers. except that each one we know is in our blood. Don't recall graves. Memory is permanent. Remember the afternoon's yellow suburban annunciation. Your goalie in his frightening mask dreams perhaps of gentleness.

Written by Marge Piercy | Belly Good A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs but I've never seen wheat in a pile. Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek as a seal hauled out in the winter sun. I can see you as a great goose egg or a single juicy and fully ripe peach. You swell like a natural grassy hill. You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound, with the eye of the navel wide open, the eye of my apple, the pear's port window. You're not supposed to exist at all this decade. You're to be flat as a kitchen table, so children with roller skates can speed over you like those sidewalks of my childhood that each gave a different roar under my wheels. You're required to show muscle striations like the ocean sand at ebb tide, but brick hard. Clothing is not designed for women of whose warm and flagrant bodies you are a swelling part. Yet I confess I meditate with my hands folded on you, a maternal cushion radiating comfort. Even when I have been at my thinnest, you have never abandoned me but curled round as a sleeping cat under my skirt. When I spread out, so do you. You like to eat, drink and bang on another belly. In anxiety I clutch you with nervous fingers as if you were a purse full of calm. In my grandmother standing in the fierce sun I see your cauldron that held eleven children shaped under the tent of her summer dress. I see you in my mother at thirty in her flapper gear, skinny legs and then you knocking on the tight dress. We hand you down like a prize feather quilt. You are our female shame and sunburst strength.

Written by Katherine Mansfield | The Wounded Bird In the wide bed Under the freen embroidered quilt With flowers and leaves always in soft motion She is like a wounded bird resting on a pool. The hunter threw his dart And hit her breast,-- Hit her but did not kill. "O my wings, lift me--lift me! I am not dreadfully hurt!" Down she dropped and was still. Kind people come to the edge of the pool with baskets. "Of course what the poor bird wants is plenty of food!" Their bags and pockets are crammed almost to bursting With dinner scrapings and scraps from the servants' lunch. Oh! how pleased they are to be really giving! "In the past, you know you know, you were always so fly-away. So seldom came to the window-sill, so rarely Shared the delicious crumbs thrown into the yard. Here is a delicate fragment and her a tit-bit As good as new. And here's a morsel of relish And cake and bread and bread and bread and bread." At night, in the wide bed With the leaves and flowers Gently weaving in the darkness, She is like a wounded bird at rest on a pool. Timidly, timidly she lifts her head from her wing. In the sky there are two stars Floating, shining... O waters--do not cover me! I would look long and long at those beautiful stars! O my wings--lift me--lift me! I am not so dreadfully hurt...

Written by James A Emanuel | For A Depressed Woman I My friends do not know. But what could my friends not know? About what? What friends? II She sleeps late each day, stifling each reason to rise, choked into the quilt. III "I'll never find work." She swallows this thought with pills, finds tears in the glass.

Written by Robert Lowell | For the Union Dead "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam." The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked ***** infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze ******* breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gently tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year-- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of ***** school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the bless?d break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Written by Alfonsina Storni | I Am Going to Sleep Teeth of flowers, hairnet of dew, hands of herbs, you, perfect wet nurse, prepare the earthly sheets for me and the down quilt of weeded moss. I am going to sleep, my nurse, put me to bed. Set a lamp at my headboard; a constellation; whatever you like; all are good: lower it a bit. Leave me alone: you hear the buds breaking through . . . a celestial foot rocks you from above and a bird traces a pattern for you so you'll forget . . . Thank you. Oh, one request: if he telephones again tell him not to keep trying for I have left . . .

Written by Amy Lowell | The Red Lacquer Music-Stand A music-stand of crimson lacquer, long since brought In some fast clipper-ship from China, quaintly wrought With bossed and carven flowers and fruits in blackening gold, The slender shaft all twined about and thickly scrolled With vine leaves and young twisted tendrils, whirling, curling, Flinging their new shoots over the four wings, and swirling Out on the three wide feet in golden lumps and streams; Petals and apples in high relief, and where the seams Are worn with handling, through the polished crimson sheen, Long streaks of black, the under lacquer, shine out clean. Four desks, adjustable, to suit the heights of players Sitting to viols or standing up to sing, four layers Of music to serve every instrument, are there, And on the apex a large flat-topped golden pear. It burns in red and yellow, dusty, smouldering lights, When the sun flares the old barn-chamber with its flights And skips upon the crystal knobs of dim sideboards, Legless and mouldy, and hops, glint to glint, on hoards Of scythes, and spades, and dinner-horns, so the old tools Are little candles throwing brightness round in pools. With Oriental splendour, red and gold, the dust Covering its flames like smoke and thinning as a gust Of brighter sunshine makes the colours leap and range, The strange old music-stand seems to strike out and change; To stroke and tear the darkness with sharp golden claws; To dart a forked, vermilion tongue from open jaws; To puff out bitter smoke which chokes the sun; and fade Back to a still, faint outline obliterate in shade. Creeping up the ladder into the loft, the Boy Stands watching, very still, prickly and hot with joy. He sees the dusty sun-mote slit by streaks of red, He sees it split and stream, and all about his head Spikes and spears of gold are licking, pricking, flicking, Scratching against the walls and furniture, and nicking The darkness into sparks, chipping away the gloom. The Boy's nose smarts with the pungence in the room. The wind pushes an elm branch from before the door And the sun widens out all along the floor, Filling the barn-chamber with white, straightforward light, So not one blurred outline can tease the mind to fright. "O All ye Works of the Lord, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O let the Earth Bless the Lord; Yea, let it Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O ye Mountains and Hills, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O All ye Green Things upon the Earth, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever." The Boy will praise his God on an altar builded fair, Will heap it with the Works of the Lord. In the morning air, Spices shall burn on it, and by their pale smoke curled, Like shoots of all the Green Things, the God of this bright World Shall see the Boy's desire to pay his debt of praise. The Boy turns round about, seeking with careful gaze An altar meet and worthy, but each table and chair Has some defect, each piece is needing some repair To perfect it; the chairs have broken legs and backs, The tables are uneven, and every highboy lacks A handle or a drawer, the desks are bruised and worn, And even a wide sofa has its cane seat torn. Only in the gloom far in the corner there The lacquer music-stand is elegant and rare, Clear and slim of line, with its four wings outspread, The sound of old quartets, a tenuous, faint thread, Hanging and floating over it, it stands supreme -- Black, and gold, and crimson, in one twisted scheme! A candle on the bookcase feels a draught and wavers, Stippling the white-washed walls with dancing shades and quavers. A bed-post, grown colossal, jigs about the ceiling, And shadows, strangely altered, stain the walls, revealing Eagles, and rabbits, and weird faces pulled awry, And hands which fetch and carry things incessantly. Under the Eastern window, where the morning sun Must touch it, stands the music-stand, and on each one Of its broad platforms is a pyramid of stones, And metals, and dried flowers, and pine and hemlock cones, An oriole's nest with the four eggs neatly blown, The rattle of a rattlesnake, and three large brown Butternuts uncracked, six butterflies impaled With a green luna moth, a snake-skin freshly scaled, Some sunflower seeds, wampum, and a bloody-tooth shell, A blue jay feather, all together piled pell-mell The stand will hold no more. The Boy with humming head Looks once again, blows out the light, and creeps to bed. The Boy keeps solemn vigil, while outside the wind Blows gustily and clear, and slaps against the blind. He hardly tries to sleep, so sharp his ecstasy It burns his soul to emptiness, and sets it free For adoration only, for worship. Dedicate, His unsheathed soul is naked in its novitiate. The hours strike below from the clock on the stair. The Boy is a white flame suspiring in prayer. Morning will bring the sun, the Golden Eye of Him Whose splendour must be veiled by starry cherubim, Whose Feet shimmer like crystal in the streets of Heaven. Like an open rose the sun will stand up even, Fronting the window-sill, and when the casement glows Rose-red with the new-blown morning, then the fire which flows From the sun will fall upon the altar and ignite The spices, and his sacrifice will burn in perfumed light. Over the music-stand the ghosts of sounds will swim, `Viols d'amore' and `hautbois' accorded to a hymn. The Boy will see the faintest breath of angels' wings Fanning the smoke, and voices will flower through the strings. He dares no farther vision, and with scalding eyes Waits upon the daylight and his great emprise. The cold, grey light of dawn was whitening the wall When the Boy, fine-drawn by sleeplessness, started his ritual. He washed, all shivering and pointed like a flame. He threw the shutters open, and in the window-frame The morning glimmered like a tarnished Venice glass. He took his Chinese pastilles and put them in a mass Upon the mantelpiece till he could seek a plate Worthy to hold them burning. Alas! He had been late In thinking of this need, and now he could not find Platter or saucer rare enough to ease his mind. The house was not astir, and he dared not go down Into the barn-chamber, lest some door should be blown And slam before the draught he made as he went out. The light was growing yellower, and still he looked about. A flash of almost crimson from the gilded pear Upon the music-stand, startled him waiting there. The sun would rise and he would meet it unprepared, Labelled a fool in having missed what he had dared. He ran across the room, took his pastilles and laid Them on the flat-topped pear, most carefully displayed To light with ease, then stood a little to one side, Focussed a burning-glass and painstakingly tried To hold it angled so the bunched and prismed rays Should leap upon each other and spring into a blaze. Sharp as a wheeling edge of disked, carnation flame, Gem-hard and cutting upward, slowly the round sun came. The arrowed fire caught the burning-glass and glanced, Split to a multitude of pointed spears, and lanced, A deeper, hotter flame, it took the incense pile Which welcomed it and broke into a little smile Of yellow flamelets, creeping, crackling, thrusting up, A golden, red-slashed lily in a lacquer cup. "O ye Fire and Heat, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O ye Winter and Summer, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O ye Nights and Days, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever. O ye Lightnings and Clouds, Bless ye the Lord; Praise Him, and Magnify Him for ever." A moment so it hung, wide-curved, bright-petalled, seeming A chalice foamed with sunrise. The Boy woke from his dreaming. A spike of flame had caught the card of butterflies, The oriole's nest took fire, soon all four galleries Where he had spread his treasures were become one tongue Of gleaming, brutal fire. The Boy instantly swung His pitcher off the wash-stand and turned it upside down. The flames drooped back and sizzled, and all his senses grown Acute by fear, the Boy grabbed the quilt from his bed And flung it over all, and then with aching head He watched the early sunshine glint on the remains Of his holy offering. The lacquer stand had stains Ugly and charred all over, and where the golden pear Had been, a deep, black hole gaped miserably. His dear Treasures were puffs of ashes; only the stones were there, Winking in the brightness. The clock upon the stair Struck five, and in the kitchen someone shook a grate. The Boy began to dress, for it was getting late.

Written by Mark Doty | To Bessie Drennan Because she could find no one else to paint a picture of the old family place where she and her sisters lived. . .she attended an adult education class in Montpelier. In one evening Bessie Drennan learned everything she would need to accomplish her goals. . . The Vermont Folklife Center Newsletter Bessie, you've made space dizzy with your perfected technique for snow: white spatters and a dry brush feathering everything in the world seem to make the firmament fly. Four roads converge on the heart of town, this knot of white and yellow houses angling off kilter, their astigmatic windows almost all in rows. Lucky the skater threading the yellow tavern's quilt-sized pond, the yellow dogs who punctuate the village where our occupations are chasing and being chaste, sleighing and sledding and snowshoeing from house to house in our conical, flamelike hats. Even the barns are sliding in snow, though the birches are all golden and one maple blazes without being consumed. Is it from a hill nearby we're watching, or somewhere in the sky? Could we be flying on slick runners down into the village? Is that mare with the elegant legs truly the size of a house, and is this the store where everyone bought those pointed hats, the snowshoes that angle in contradictory directions? Isn't that Rin Tin Tin, bigtongued and bounding and in two places at once? Down there in the world's corner two children steal away onto the frozen pond, carrying their toboggan. Even the weathervanes --bounding fish, a sailing stag--look happy. The houses are swaying, Bessie, and nothing is grounded in shadow, set loose by weather and art from gravity's constraints. And though I think this man is falling, is it anything but joyous, the arc his red scarf transcribes in the air?

Written by Joseph Brodsky | Belfast Tune Here's a girl from a dangerous town She crops her dark hair short so that less of her has to frown when someine gets hurt. She folds her memories like a parachute. Dropped she collects the peat and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot here where they eat. Ah there's more sky in these parts than say ground. Hence her voice's pitch and her stare stains your retina like a gray bulb when you switch hemispheres and her knee-length quilt skirt's cut to catch the squal I dream of her either loved or killed because the town's too small.