Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Sewn Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Sewn poems, articles about Sewn poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Sewn poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Roger McGough | Create an image from this poem

First Day at School

 A millionbillionwillion miles from home
Waiting for the bell to go.
(To go where?) Why are they all so big, other children? So noisy? So much at home they Must have been born in uniform Lived all their lives in playgrounds Spent the years inventing games That don't let me in.
Games That are rough, that swallow you up.
And the railings.
All around, the railings.
Are they to keep out wolves and monsters? Things that carry off and eat children? Things you don't take sweets from? Perhaps they're to stop us getting out Running away from the lessins.
Lessin.
What does a lessin look like? Sounds small and slimy.
They keep them in the glassrooms.
Whole rooms made out of glass.
Imagine.
I wish I could remember my name Mummy said it would come in useful.
Like wellies.
When there's puddles.
Yellowwellies.
I wish she was here.
I think my name is sewn on somewhere Perhaps the teacher will read it for me.
Tea-cher.
The one who makes the tea.


Written by Marge Piercy | Create an image from this poem

My Mothers Body

 1.
The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads: then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid no mind, napping after lunch yet fifteen hundred miles north I heard and dropped a dish.
Your pain sunk talons in my skull and crouched there cawing, heavy as a great vessel filled with water, oil or blood, till suddenly next day the weight lifted and I knew your mind had guttered out like the Chanukah candles that burn so fast, weeping veils of wax down the chanukiya.
Those candles were laid out, friends invited, ingredients bought for latkes and apple pancakes, that holiday for liberation and the winter solstice when tops turn like little planets.
Shall you have all or nothing take half or pass by untouched? Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl as the room stopped spinning.
The angel folded you up like laundry your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains hanging on the window of what had been your flesh and now was glass.
Outside in Florida shopping plazas loudspeakers blared Christmas carols and palm trees were decked with blinking lights.
Except by the tourist hotels, the beaches were empty.
Pelicans with pregnant pouches flapped overhead like pterodactyls.
In my mind I felt you die.
First the pain lifted and then you flickered and went out.
2.
I walk through the rooms of memory.
Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths, every chair ghostly and muted.
Other times memory lights up from within bustling scenes acted just the other side of a scrim through which surely I could reach my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain of time which is and isn't and will be the stuff of which we're made and unmade.
In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen your first nasty marriage just annulled, thin from your abortion, clutching a book against your cheek and trying to look older, trying to took middle class, trying for a job at Wanamaker's, dressing for parties in cast off stage costumes of your sisters.
Your eyes were hazy with dreams.
You did not notice me waving as you wandered past and I saw your slip was showing.
You stood still while I fixed your clothes, as if I were your mother.
Remember me combing your springy black hair, ringlets that seemed metallic, glittering; remember me dressing you, my seventy year old mother who was my last dollbaby, giving you too late what your youth had wanted.
3.
What is this mask of skin we wear, what is this dress of flesh, this coat of few colors and little hair? This voluptuous seething heap of desires and fears, squeaking mice turned up in a steaming haystack with their babies? This coat has been handed down, an heirloom this coat of black hair and ample flesh, this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.
This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks they provided cushioning for my grandmother Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me and we all sat on them in turn, those major muscles on which we walk and walk and walk over the earth in search of peace and plenty.
My mother is my mirror and I am hers.
What do we see? Our face grown young again, our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.
Our arms quivering with fat, eyes set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy, our belly seamed with childbearing, Give me your dress that I might try it on.
Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat.
I will not fit you mother.
I will not be the bride you can dress, the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew, a dog's leather bone to sharpen your teeth.
You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
My twin, my sister, my lost love, I carry you in me like an embryo as once you carried me.
4.
What is it we turn from, what is it we fear? Did I truly think you could put me back inside? Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten furnace and be recast, that I would become you? What did you fear in me, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness, when you a proper flapper wore yours cropped? You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.
Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.
Secretly the bones formed in the bread.
I became willful, private as a cat.
You never knew what alleys I had wandered.
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter queen in a dress sewn of knives.
All I feared was being stuck in a box with a lid.
A good woman appeared to me indistinguishable from a dead one except that she worked all the time.
Your payday never came.
Your dreams ran with bright colors like Mexican cottons that bled onto the drab sheets of the day and would not bleach with scrubbing.
My dear, what you said was one thing but what you sang was another, sweetly subversive and dark as blackberries and I became the daughter of your dream.
This body is your body, ashes now and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts, my throat, my thighs.
You run in me a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood, you sing in my mind like wine.
What you did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Flee On Your Donkey

 Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger puts the inked-in X's— for this is a mental hospital, not a child's game.
Today an intern knocks my knees, testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack on the stethoscope.
Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse.
She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
The curtains, lazy and delicate, billow and flutter and drop like the Victorian skirts of my two maiden aunts who kept an antique shop.
Hornets have been sent.
They cluster like floral arrangements on the screen.
Hornets, dragging their thin stingers, hover outside, all knowing, hissing: the hornet knows.
I heard it as a child but what was it that he meant? The hornet knows! What happened to Jack and Doc and Reggy? Who remembers what lurks in the heart of man? What did The Green Hornet mean, he knows? Or have I got it wrong? Is it The Shadow who had seen me from my bedside radio? Now it's Dinn, Dinn, Dinn! while the ladies in the next room argue and pick their teeth.
Upstairs a girl curls like a snail; in another room someone tries to eat a shoe; meanwhile an adolescent pads up and down the hall in his white tennis socks.
A new doctor makes rounds advertising tranquilizers, insulin, or shock to the uninitiated.
Six years of such small preoccupations! Six years of shuttling in and out of this place! O my hunger! My hunger! I could have gone around the world twice or had new children - all boys.
It was a long trip with little days in it and no new places.
In here, it's the same old crowd, the same ruined scene.
The alcoholic arrives with his gold culbs.
The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn into the lining of her dress.
The permanent guests have done nothing new.
Their faces are still small like babies with jaundice.
Meanwhile, they carried out my mother, wrapped like somebody's doll, in sheets, bandaged her jaw and stuffed up her holes.
My father, too.
He went out on the rotten blood he used up on other women in the Middle West.
He went out, a cured old alcoholic on crooked feet and useless hands.
He went out calling for his father who died all by himself long ago - that fat banker who got locked up, his genes suspened like dollars, wrapped up in his secret, tied up securely in a straitjacket.
But you, my doctor, my enthusiast, were better than Christ; you promised me another world to tell me who I was.
I spent most of my time, a stranger, damned and in trance—that little hut, that naked blue-veined place, my eyes shut on the confusing office, eyes circling into my childhood, eyes newly cut.
Years of hints strung out—a serialized case history— thirty-three years of the same dull incest that sustained us both.
You, my bachelor analyst, who sat on Marlborough Street, sharing your office with your mother and giving up cigarettes each New Year, were the new God, the manager of the Gideon Bible.
I was your third-grader with a blue star on my forehead.
In trance I could be any age, voice, gesture—all turned backward like a drugstore clock.
Awake, I memorized dreams.
Dreams came into the ring like third string fighters, each one a bad bet who might win because there was no other.
I stared at them, concentrating on the abyss the way one looks down into a rock quarry, uncountable miles down, my hands swinging down like hooks to pull dreams up out of their cage.
O my hunger! My hunger! Once, outside your office, I collapsed in the old-fashioned swoon between the illegally parked cars.
I threw myself down, pretending dead for eight hours.
I thought I had died into a snowstorm.
Above my head chains cracked along like teeth digging their way through the snowy street.
I lay there like an overcoat that someone had thrown away.
You carried me back in, awkwardly, tenderly, with help of the red-haired secretary who was built like a lifeguard.
My shoes, I remember, were lost in the snowbank as if I planned never to walk again.
That was the winter that my mother died, half mad on morphine, blown up, at last, like a pregnant pig.
I was her dreamy evil eye.
In fact, I carried a knife in my pocketbook— my husband's good L.
L.
Bean hunting knife.
I wasn't sure if I should slash a tire or scrape the guts out of some dream.
You taught me to believe in dreams; thus I was the dredger.
I held them like an old woman with arthritic fingers, carefully straining the water out— sweet dark playthings, and above all, mysterious until they grew mournful and weak.
O my hunger! My hunger! I was the one who opened the warm eyelid like a surgeon and brought forth young girls to grunt like fish.
I told you, I said— but I was lying— that the kife was for my mother .
.
.
and then I delivered her.
The curtains flutter out and slump against the bars.
They are my two thin ladies named Blanche and Rose.
The grounds outside are pruned like an estate at Newport.
Far off, in the field, something yellow grows.
Was it last month or last year that the ambulance ran like a hearse with its siren blowing on suicide— Dinn, dinn, dinn!— a noon whistle that kept insisting on life all the way through the traffic lights? I have come back but disorder is not what it was.
I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it! That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat with his fiery joke, his manic smile— even he seems blurred, small and pale.
I have come back, recommitted, fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger, held like a prisoner who was so poor he fell in love with jail.
I stand at this old window complaining of the soup, examining the grounds, allowing myself the wasted life.
Soon I will raise my face for a white flag, and when God enters the fort, I won't spit or gag on his finger.
I will eat it like a white flower.
Is this the old trick, the wasting away, the skull that waits for its dose of electric power? This is madness but a kind of hunger.
What good are my questions in this hierarchy of death where the earth and the stones go Dinn! Dinn! Dinn! It is hardly a feast.
It is my stomach that makes me suffer.
Turn, my hungers! For once make a deliberate decision.
There are brains that rot here like black bananas.
Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates.
Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Ride out any old way you please! In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That's what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it— the fool's disease.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Live

 Live or die, but don't poison everything.
.
.
Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient is mutilation.
And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn *****! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up.
And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer.
What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes.
Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed.
O dearest three, I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms.
So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny ****.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb.
, lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected.
Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

Again and Again and Again

 You said the anger would come back 
just as the love did.
I have a black look I do not like.
It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old.
It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot.
I have sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it and I have placed you and your child at its milk tip.
Oh the blackness is murderous and the milk tip is brimming and each machine is working and I will kiss you when I cut up one dozen new men and you will die somewhat, again and again.


Written by Lisel Mueller | Create an image from this poem

Alive Together

 Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pop
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague.
I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff.
I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend.
I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who--but for endless ifs-- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.
Written by William Allingham | Create an image from this poem

Lepracaun or Fairy Shoemaker The

 Little Cowboy, what have you heard,
Up on the lonely rath's green mound?
Only the plaintive yellow bird
Sighing in sultry fields around,
Chary, chary, chary, chee-ee! -
Only the grasshopper and the bee? -
"Tip-tap, rip-rap,
Tick-a-tack-too!
Scarlet leather, sewn together,
This will make a shoe.
Left, right, pull it tight; Summer days are warm; Underground in winter, Laughing at the storm!" Lay your ear close to the hill.
Do you not catch th etiny clamour, Busy click of an elfin hammer.
Voice of the Lepracaun singing shrill As he merrily plies his trade? He's a span And a quarter in height, Get him in sight, hold him tight, And you're a made Man! You watch your cattle the summerday, Sup on potatoes, sleep in the hay; how would you like to roll in your carriage, Look for a duchess's daughter in marriage? Seize the shoemaker - then you may! "Big boots a -hunting, Sandals in the hall, White for a wedding feast, Pink for a ball.
This way, that way, So we makea shoe; Getting rich every stitch, Tick-a-tack too!" Nine and ninety treasure crocks This keen miser fairy hath, Hid in the mountains, woods and rocks, Ruin and round-tow'r, cave and rath, And where cormorants build; From times of old Guarded by him; Each of them fill'd Full to the brim With gold! I caught him at work one day, myself, In the castle ditch where fox-glove grows, - A wrinkled, wizen'd and bearded Elf, Spectacles stuck on his pointed nose, Silver buckles to his hose, Leather apron - shoe in his lap - 'Rip-rap, tip-tap, Tick-tack-too! (A grasshopper on my cap! Away the moth flew!) Buskins for a fairy prince, Brogues for his son - Pay me well, pay me well, When the job is done!" The rogue was mine, beyond a doubt.
I stared at him, he stared at me; "Servant Sir!" "Humph" says he, And pull'd a snuff-box out.
He took a long pinch, look'd better pleased, The ***** little Lepracaun; Offer'd the box with a whimsical grace, - Pouf! He flung the dust in my face, And while I sneezed, Was gone!
Written by Ben Jonson | Create an image from this poem

To Fine Grand


LXXIII.
 — TO FINE GRAND.

What is't, FINE GRAND, makes thee my friendship fly,
Or take an Epigram so fearfully,
As 'twere a challenge, or a borrower's letter:
The world must know your greatness is my debtor.
Imprimis, Grand, you owe me for a jest
I lent you, on mere acquaintance, at a feast.
Item, a tale or two some fortnight after,
That yet maintains you, and your house in laughter.
Item, the Babylonian song you sing;
Item, a fair Greek poesy for a ring,
With which a learned madam you bely.
Item, a charm surrounding fearfully
Your partie-per-pale picture, one half drawn
In solemn cypress, th' other cobweb lawn.
Item, a gulling imprese for you, at tilt.
Item, your mistress' anagram, in your hilt.
Item, your own, sewn in your mistress' smock.
Item, an epitaph on my lord's cock,
In most vile verses, and cost me more pain,
Than had I made 'em good, to fit your vein.
Forty things more, dear Grand, which you know true,
For which, or pay me quickly, or I'll pay you.

Written by Erin Moure | Create an image from this poem

A Real Motorcycle

 Unspeakable.
The word that fills up the poem, that the head tries to excise.
At 6 a.
m.
, the wet lion.
Its sewn plush face on the porch rail in the rain.
Heavy rains later, & maybe a thunderstorm.
12 or 13 degrees.
Inside: an iris, candle, poster of the many-breasted Artemis in a stone hat from Anatolia A little pedal steel guitar A photograph of her at a table by the sea, her shoulder blocked by the red geranium.
The sea tho invisible can be smelled by the casual watcher Incredible salt air in my throat when I see her.
"Suddenly you discover that you'll spend your entire life in disorder; it's all that you have; you must learn to live with it.
" 2 Four tanks, & the human white-shirted body stopped on June 5 in Place Tian an Men.
Or "a red pullover K-Way.
" There is not much time left to say these things.
The urgency of that, desire that dogged the body all winter & has scarcely left, now awaits the lilacs, their small white bunches.
Gaily.
As if their posies will light up the curious old intentional bruise.
Adjective, adjective, adjective, noun! 3 Or just, lilac moon.
What we must, & cannot, excise from the head.
Her hand holding, oh, The New Path to the Waterfall? Or the time I walked in too quickly, looked up at her shirtless, grinning.
Pulling her down into the front of me, silly! Sitting down sudden to make a lap for her.
.
.
Kissing the back of her leg.
4 Actually the leg kiss was a dream, later enacted we laughed at it, why didn't you do it she said when you thought of it.
The excisable thought, later desired or necessary.
Or shuddered at, in memory.
Later, it is repeated for the cameras with such unease.
& now, stuck in the head.
Like running the motorcycle full-tilt into the hay bales.
What is the motorcycle doing in the poem A.
said.
It's an image, E.
said back.
It's a crash in the head, she said.
It's a real motorcycle.
Afterthought 1 0 excise this: her back turned, she concentrates on something in a kitchen sink, & I sit behind her, running my fingers on the table edge.
0 excise this.
Afterthought 2 & after, excise, excise.
If the source of the pain could be located using geological survey equipment.
Into the sedimentary layers, the slippage, the surge of the igneous intrusion.
Or the flat bottom of the former sea I grew up on, Running the motorcycle into the round bay bales.
Hay grass poking the skin.
The back wet.
Hey, I shouted, Her back turned to me, its location now visible only in the head.
When I can't stand it, I invent anything, even memories.
She gets up, hair stuck with hay.
I invented this.
Yeow.
Written by Craig Raine | Create an image from this poem

The Onion Memory

 Divorced, but friends again at last,
we walk old ground together
in bright blue uncomplicated weather.
We laugh and pause to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs, prehistoric, crenelated, cast between the tractor ruts in mud.
On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks, swinging on the chestnut's unlit chandelier, defies the corporation spears-- a single rank around the bole, rusty with blood.
Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance A gust--the old flag blazes on its pole.
In the village bakery the pastry babies pass from milky slump to crusty cadaver, from crib to coffin--without palaver.
All's over in a flash, too silently.
.
.
Tonight the arum lilies fold back napkins monogrammed in gold, crisp and laundered fresh.
Those crustaceous gladioli, on the sly, reveal the crimson flower-flesh inside their emerald armor plate.
The uncooked herrings blink a tearful eye.
The candles palpitate.
The Oistrakhs bow and scrape in evening dress, on Emi-tape.
Outside the trees are bending over backwards to please the wind : the shining sword grass flattens on its belly.
The white-thorn's frillies offer no resistance.
In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly strives to keep a sense of balance.
I slice up the onions.
You sew up a dress.
This is the quiet echo--flesh-- white muscle on white muscle, intimately folded skin, finished with a satin rustle.
One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread.
It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.
Because there's everything and nothing to be said, the clock with hands held up before its face, stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase-- while we, together and apart, repeat unfinished festures got by heart.
And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line-- headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine.