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Best Famous Shouldering Poems

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

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Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

The New Hieroglyphics

 In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
Thumbs down to ear and tongue: World can be written and read, even painted but not spoken.
People use their own words.
Latin letters are in it for names, for e.
g.
OK and H2S O4, for musical notes, but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure have escaped their toilet doors.
I (that is, saya, Ego, watashji wa) am two eyes without pupils; those aren't seen when you look out through them.
You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips is confidential.
Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.
The effort is always to make the symbols obvious: the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course for flying doctor.
Prams under fire? Soviet film industry.
Pictographs also shouldn't be too culture-bound: A heart circled and crossed out surely isn't.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.
Black is the ace of spades.
The kind of spades reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sing , the scales.
Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs and computers can draw them faster than Pharaoh's scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action, but everywhere there's sunflower talk, i.
e.
metaphor, as we've seen.
A figure riding a skyhook bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace, two animals in a book read Nature, two books Inside an animal, instinct.
Rice in bowl with chopsticks denotes food.
Figure 1 lying prone equals other.
Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech balloon is ubiquitous.
A bull inside one is dialect for placards inside one.
Sun and moon together inside one is poetry.
Sun and moon over palette, over shoes etc are all art forms — but above a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that and you're starting to think in World, whose grammar is Chinese-terse and fluid.
Who needs the square- equals-diamond book, the dictionary,to know figures led by strings to their genitals mean fashion? just as a skirt beneath a circle meanas demure or ao similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.
All peoples are at times cat in water with this language but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.


Written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Create an image from this poem

Discontent

 LIGHT human nature is too lightly tost
And ruffled without cause, complaining on--
Restless with rest, until, being overthrown,
It learneth to lie quiet.
Let a frost Or a small wasp have crept to the inner-most Of our ripe peach, or let the wilful sun Shine westward of our window,--straight we run A furlong's sigh as if the world were lost.
But what time through the heart and through the brain God hath transfixed us,--we, so moved before, Attain to a calm.
Ay, shouldering weights of pain, We anchor in deep waters, safe from shore, And hear submissive o'er the stormy main God's chartered judgments walk for evermore.
Written by Jorie Graham | Create an image from this poem

Le Manteau De Pascal

 I have put on my great coat it is cold.
It is an outer garment.
Coarse, woolen.
Of unknown origin.
* It has a fine inner lining but it is as an exterior that you see it — a grace.
* I have a coat I am wearing.
It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions has made, skillfully, something dark-true, as the evening calls the bird up into the branches of the shaven hedgerows, to twitter bodily a makeshift coat — the boxelder cut back stringently by the owner that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know — the birds tucked gestures on the inner branches — and space in the heart, not shade-giving, not chronological.
.
.
Oh transformer, logic, where are you here in this fold, my name being called-out now but back, behind, in the upper world.
.
.
.
* I have a coat I am wearing I was told to wear it.
Someone knelt down each morning to button it up.
I looked at their face, down low, near me.
What is longing? what is a star? Watched each button a peapod getting tucked back in.
Watched harm with its planeloads folded up in the sleeves.
Watched grappling hooks trawl through the late-night waters.
Watched bands of stations scan unable to ascertain.
There are fingers, friend, that never grow sluggish.
They crawl up the coat and don't miss an eyehole.
Glinting in kitchenlight.
Supervised by the traffic god.
Hissed at by grassblades that wire-up outside their stirring rhetoric — this is your land, this is my my — * You do understanding, don't you, by looking? The coat, which is itself a ramification, a city, floats vulnerably above another city, ours, the city on the hill (only with hill gone), floats in illustration of what once was believed, and thus was visible — (all things believed are visible) — floats a Jacob's ladder with hovering empty arms, an open throat, a place where a heart might beat if it wishes, pockets that hang awaiting the sandy whirr of a small secret, folds where the legs could be, with their kneeling mechanism, the floating fatigue of an after-dinner herald, not guilty of any treason towards life except fatigue, a skillfully cut coat, without chronology, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed — as then it is, abruptly, the last stitch laid in, the knot bit off — hung there in Gravity, as if its innermost desire, numberless the awaitings flickering around it, the other created things also floating but not of the same order, no, not like this form, built so perfectly to mantle the body, the neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower, a skirting barely visible where the tucks indicate the mild loss of bearing in the small of the back, the grammar, so strict, of the two exact shoulders — and the law of the shouldering — and the chill allowed to skitter up through, and those crucial spots where the fit cannot be perfect — oh skirted loosening aswarm with lessenings, with the mild pallors of unaccomplishment, flaps night-air collects in, folds.
.
.
But the night does not annul its belief in, the night preserves its love for, this one narrowing of infinity, that floats up into the royal starpocked blue its ripped, distracted supervisor — this coat awaiting recollection, this coat awaiting the fleeting moment, the true moment, the hill,the vision of the hill, and then the moment when the prize is lost, and the erotic tinglings of the dream of reason are left to linger mildly in the weave of the fabric according to the rules, the wool gabardine mix, with its grammatical weave, never never destined to lose its elasticity, its openness to abandonment, its willingness to be disturbed.
* July 11 .
.
.
Oaks: the organization of this tree is difficult.
Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar wd.
roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points.
But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating there is a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve-pieces.
And since the end shoots curl and carry young scanty leaf-stars these clubs are tapered, and I have seen also pieces in profile with chiseled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end.
However the knot-star is the chief thing: it is whorled, worked round, and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree.
Oaks differ much, and much turns on the broadness of the leaves, the narrower giving the crisped and starry and catharine-wheel forms, the broader the flat-pieced mailed or chard-covered ones, in wh.
it is possible to see composition in dips, etc.
But I shall study them further.
It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.
* How many coats do you think it will take? The coat was a great-coat.
The Emperor's coat was.
How many coats do you think it will take? The undercoat is dry.
What we now want is? The sky can analyse the coat because of the rips in it.
The sky shivers through the coat because of the rips in it.
The rips in the sky ripen through the rips in the coat.
There is no quarrel.
* I take off my coat and carry it.
* There is no emergency.
* I only made that up.
* Behind everything the sound of something dripping The sound of something: I will vanish, others will come here, what is that? The canvas flapping in the wind like the first notes of our absence An origin is not an action though it occurs at the very start Desire goes travelling into the total dark of another's soul looking for where it breaks off I was a hard thing to undo * The life of a customer What came on the paper plate overheard nearby an impermanence of structure watching the lip-reading had loved but couldn't now recognize * What are the objects, then, that man should consider most important? What sort of a question is that he asks them.
The eye only discovers the visible slowly.
It floats before us asking to be worn, offering "we must think about objects at the very moment when all their meaning is abandoning them" and "the title provides a protection from significance" and "we are responsible for the universe.
" * I have put on my doubting, my wager, it is cold.
It is an outer garment, or, conversely a natural covering, so coarse and woolen, also of unknown origin, a barely apprehensible dilution of evening into an outer garment, or, conversely a natural covering, to twitter bodily a makeshift coat, that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know, not shade-giving, not chronological, my name being called out now but from out back, behind, an outer garment, so coarse and woolen, also of unknown origin, not shade-giving, not chronological, each harm with its planeloads folded up in the sleeves, you do understand, don't you, by looking? the jacob's ladder with its floating arms its open throat, that more might grow next year, and thicker, you know, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, the other created things also floating but not of the same order, not shade-giving, not chronological, you do understand, don't you, by looking? a neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower, filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, the moment the prize is lost, the erotic tingling, the wool-gabardine mix, its grammatical weave — you do understand, don't you, by looking? — never never destined to lose its elasticity, it was this night I believe but possibly the next I saw clearly the impossibility of staying filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, also of unknown origin, not shade-giving, not chronological since the normal growth of boughs is radiating a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve pieces — never never destined to lose its elasticity my name being called out now but back, behind, hissing how many coats do you think it will take "or try with eyesight to divide" (there is no quarrel) behind everything the sound of something dripping a system of spoke-wise clubs of green — sleeve pieces filled with the sensation of suddenly being completed the wool gabardine mix, the grammatical weave, the never-never-to-lose-its-elasticity: my name flapping in the wind like the first note of my absence hissing how many coats do you think it will take are you a test case is it an emergency flapping in the wind the first note of something overheard nearby an impermanence of structure watching the lip-reading, there is no quarrel, I will vanish, others will come here, what is that, never never to lose the sensation of suddenly being completed in the wind — the first note of our quarrel — it was this night I believe or possibly the next filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed, I will vanish, others will come here, what is that now floating in the air before us with stars a test case that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying
Written by Marge Piercy | Create an image from this poem

Winter Promises

 Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby's buttocks, 
eggplants glossy as waxed fenders, 
purple neon flawless glistening 
peppers, pole beans fecund and fast 
growing as Jack's Viagra-sped stalk, 
big as truck tire zinnias that mildew 
will never wilt, roses weighing down 
a bush never touched by black spot, 
brave little fruit trees shouldering up 
their spotless ornaments of glass fruit: 

I lie on the couch under a blanket 
of seed catalogs ordering far 
too much.
Sleet slides down the windows, a wind edged with ice knifes through every crack.
Lie to me, sweet garden-mongers: I want to believe every promise, to trust in five pound tomatoes and dahlias brighter than the sun that was eaten by frost last week.
Written by Philip Larkin | Create an image from this poem

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In thesun the slagheap slept.
Down the lane came men in pitboots Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke Shouldering off the freshened silence.
One chased after rabbits; lost them; Came back with a nest of lark's eggs; Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.
SO they passed in beards and moleskins Fathers brothers nicknames laughter Through the tall gates standing open.
At noon there came a tremor; cows Stopped chewing for a second; sun Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.
The dead go on before us they Are sitting in God's house in comfort We shall see them face to face-- plian as lettering in the chapels It was said and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion Larger than in life they managed-- Gold as on a coin or walking Somehow from the sun towards them One showing the eggs unbroken.


Written by Philip Levine | Create an image from this poem

The Distant Winter

 from an officer's diary during the last war

I 

The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids.
"Stephan! Stephan!" The rattling orderly Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands: Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea, Yesterday's napkins, and an opened letter.
"Your asthma's bad, old man.
" He doesn't answer, And turns to the grey windows and the weather.
"Don't worry, Stephan, the lungs will go to cancer.
" II I speak, "the enemy's exhausted, victory Is almost ours.
.
.
" These twenty new recruits, Conscripted for the battles lost already, Were once the young, exchanging bitter winks, And shuffling when I rose to eloquence, Determined not to die and not to show The fear that held them in their careless stance, And yet they died, how many wars ago? Or came back cream puffs, 45, and fat.
I know that I am touched for my eyes brim With tears I had forgotten.
Death is not For these car salesmen whose only dream Is of a small percentage of the take.
Oh my eternal smilers, weep for death Whose harvest withers with your aged aches And cannot make the grave for lack of breath.
III Did you wet? Oh no, he had not wet.
How could he say it, it was hard to say Because he did not understand it yet.
It had to do, maybe, with being away, With being here where nothing seemed to matter.
It will be better, you will see tomorrow, I told him, in a while it will be better, And all the while staring from the mirror I saw those eyes, my eyes devouring me.
I cannot fire my rifle, I'm aftaid Even to aim at what I cannot see.
This was his voice, or was it mine I heard? How do I know that in this foul latrine I calmed a soldier, infantile, manic? Could he be real with such eyes pinched between The immense floating shoulders of his tunic? IV Around the table where the map is spread The officers gather.
Now the colonel leans Into the blinkered light from overhead And with a penknife improvises plans For our departure.
Plans delivered by An old staff courier on his bicycle.
One looks at him and wonders does he say, I lean out and I let my shadow fall Shouldering the picture that we call the world And there is darkness? Does he say such things? Or is there merely silence in his head? Or other voices which the silence rings? Such a fine skull and forehead, broad and flat, The eyes opaque and slightly animal.
I can come closer to a starving cat, I can read hunger in its eyes and feel In the irregular motions of its tail A need that I could feel.
He slips his knife Into the terminal where we entrain And something seems to issue from my life.
V In the mice-sawed potato fields dusk waits.
My dull ones march by fours on the playground, Kicking up dust; The column hesitates As though in answer to the rising wind, To darkness and the coldness it must enter.
Listen, my heroes, my half frozen men, The corporal calls us to that distant winter Where we will merge the nothingness within.
And they salute as one and stand at peace.
Keeping an arm's distance from everything, I answer them, knowing they see no face Between my helmet and my helmet thong.
VI But three more days and we'll be moving out.
The cupboard of the state is bare, no one, Not God himself, can raise another recruit.
Drinking my hot tea, listening to the rain, I sit while Stephan packs, grumbling a bit.
He breaks the china that my mother sent, Her own first china, as a wedding gift.
"Now that your wife is dead, Captain, why can't The two of us really make love together?" I cannot answer.
When I lift a plate It seems I almost hear my long-dead mother Saying, Watch out, the glass is underfoot.
Stephan is touching me.
"Captain, why not? Three days from now and this will all be gone.
It no longer is!" Son, you don't shout, In the long run it doesn't help the pain.
I gather the brittle bits and cut my finger On the chipped rim of my wife's favorite glass, And cannot make the simple bleeding linger.
"Captain, Captain, there's no one watching us.
"
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Adelaide Crapsey

 AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
 I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea: Mother of God, I’m so little a thing, Let me sing longer, Only a little longer.
And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.
Written by George Herbert | Create an image from this poem

Peace

 And sometimes I am sorry when the grass
Is growing over the stones in quiet hollows
And the cocksfoot leans across the rutted cart-pass
That I am not the voice of country fellows
Who now are standing by some headland talking
Of turnips and potatoes or young corn
Of turf banks stripped for victory.
Here Peace is still hawking His coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn.
Upon a headland by a whinny hedge A hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrow There's an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridge And someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.
Out of that childhood country what fools climb To fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Brass Keys

 JOY … weaving two violet petals for a coat lapel … painting on a slab of night sky a Christ face … slipping new brass keys into rusty iron locks and shouldering till at last the door gives and we are in a new room … forever and ever violet petals, slabs, the Christ face, brass keys and new rooms.
are we near or far?… is there anything else?… who comes back?… and why does love ask nothing and give all? and why is love rare as a tailed comet shaking guesses out of men at telescopes ten feet long? why does the mystery sit with its chin on the lean forearm of women in gray eyes and women in hazel eyes? are any of these less proud, less important, than a cross-examining lawyer? are any of these less perfect than the front page of a morning newspaper? the answers are not computed and attested in the back of an arithmetic for the verifications of the lazy there is no authority in the phone book for us to call and ask the why, the wherefore, and the howbeit it’s … a riddle … by God.
Written by Rudyard Kipling | Create an image from this poem

The Destroyers

 The strength of twice three thousand horse
 That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
 The hate that swings the whole;
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
 At gaze and gone again --
The Brides of Death that wait the groom --
 The Choosers of the Slain!

Offshore where sea and skyline blend
 In rain, the daylight dies;
The sullen, shouldering sweels attend
 Night and our sacrifice.
Adown the stricken capes no flare -- No mark on spit or bar, -- Birdled and desperate we dare The blindfold game of war.
Nearer the up-flung beams that spell The council of our foes; Clearer the barking guns that tell Their scattered flank to close.
Sheer to the trap they crowd their way From ports for this unbarred.
Quiet, and count our laden prey, The convoy and her guard! On shoal with carce a foot below, Where rock and islet throng, Hidden and hushed we watch them throw Their anxious lights along.
Not here, not here your danger lies -- (Stare hard, O hooded eyne!) Save were the dazed rock-pigeons rise The lit cliffs give no sign.
Therefore -- to break the rest ye seek, The Narrow Seas to clear -- Hark to the siren's whimpering shriek -- The driven death is here! Look to your van a league away, -- What midnight terror stays The bulk that checks against the spray Her crackling tops ablaze? Hit, and hard hit! The blow went home, The muffled, knocking stroke -- The steam that overruns the foam -- The foam that thins to smoke -- The smoke that clokes the deep aboil -- The deep that chokes her throes Till, streaked with ash and sleeked with oil, The lukewarm whirlpools close! A shadow down the sickened wave Long since her slayer fled: But hear their chattering quick-fires rave Astern, abeam, ahead! Panic that shells the drifting spar -- Loud waste with none to check -- Mad fear that rakes a scornful star Or sweeps a consort's deck.
Now, while their silly smoke hangs thick, Now ere their wits they find, Lay in and lance them to the quick -- Our gallied whales are blind! Good luck to those that see end end, Good-bye to those that drown -- For each his chance as chance shall send -- And God for all! Shut down! The strength of twice three thousand horse That serve the one command; The hand that heaves the headlong force, The hate that backs the hand: The doom-bolt in the darkness freed, The mine that splits the main; The white-hot wake, the 'wildering speed -- The Choosers of the Slain!

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