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Best Famous Savanna Poems

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

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Freedom of Love

 (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Written by Robert Hayden |

Runagate Runagate

 Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness 
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror 
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing 
and the night cold and the night long and the river 
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning 
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going

 Runagate
 Runagate
 Runagate

Many thousands rise and go
many thousands crossing over
 0 mythic North
 0 star-shaped yonder Bible city

Some go weeping and some rejoicing 
some in coffins and some in carriages 
some in silks and some in shackles

 Rise and go or fare you well

No more auction block for me
no more driver's lash for me

 If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age, 
 new breeches, plain stockings, ***** shoes; 
 if you see my Anna, likely young mulatto 
 branded E on the right cheek, R on the left, 
 catch them if you can and notify subscriber.
 
 Catch them if you can, but it won't be easy.

 They'll dart underground when you try to catch them, 
 plunge into quicksand, whirlpools, mazes, 
 torn into scorpions when you try to catch them.


And before I'll be a slave 
I'll be buried in my grave

 North star and bonanza gold
 I'm bound for the freedom, freedom-bound 
 and oh Susyanna don't you cry for me

 Runagate

 Runagate


II.

Rises from their anguish and their power,

 Harriet Tubman,

 woman of earth, whipscarred,
 a summoning, a shining

 Mean to be free

 And this was the way of it, brethren brethren, 
 way we journeyed from Can't to Can.
 
 Moon so bright and no place to hide, 
 the cry up and the patterollers riding, 
 hound dogs belling in bladed air.

 And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it, 
 we'll never make it.
 Hush that now, 
 and she's turned upon us, levelled pistol 
 glinting in the moonlight:
 Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says; 
 you keep on going now or die, she says.


Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General 
alias Moses Stealer of Slaves

In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson 
Garrett Douglass Thoreau John Brown
Armed and known to be Dangerous 

Wanted Reward Dead or Alive

 Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see 
 mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?

Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air, 
five times calling to the hants in the air.
 
Shadow of a face in the scary leaves, 
shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:

 Come ride-a my train

 Oh that train, ghost-story train 
 through swamp and savanna movering movering,
 over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish, 
 Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering,
 first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.


 Come ride-a my train

 Mean mean mean to be free.