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Best Famous Slithery Poems

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

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Written by John Betjeman | Create an image from this poem

The Cottage Hospital

 At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town,
A brick path led to a mulberry- scanty grass at its feet.
I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down Sheltering ruby fruit globes from a Sunday-tea-time heat.
Apple and plum espaliers basked upon bricks of brown; The air was swimming with insects, and children played in the street.
Out of this bright intentness into the mulberry shade Musca domestica (housefly) swung from the August light Slap into slithery rigging by the waiting spider made Which spun the lithe elastic till the fly was shrouded tight.
Down came the hairy talons and horrible poison blade And none of the garden noticed that fizzing, hopeless fight.
Say in what Cottage Hospital whose pale green walls resound With the tap upon polished parquet of inflexible nurses' feet Shall I myself by lying when they range the screens around? And say shall I groan in dying, as I twist the sweaty sheet? Or gasp for breath uncrying, as I feel my senses drown'd While the air is swimming with insects and children play in the street?


Written by Rg Gregory | Create an image from this poem

elusive wisdom

 thoth (who became hermes who became mercury)
who was both moon and wisdom to the egyptians
manifested himself mainly as an ibis - a watery bird
a restless creature that could not stop searching
through marshy ground with its sickle-shaped beak

so to the christians the bird became a scavenger
the worst sinner from whom sins sprout forth and grow
sacred ibises have had to learn (like any living body)
you can't do a thing in this damned contrary world
without someone somewhere tearing out its guts

and if you see two ibises (say) standing together
by a river waiting for their friend the moon to appear
they do have the stance of a couple of old professors
who have said all there is to say about the fraught
histories of every species that has got itself a life

not that they disguise their own frailties - any joker
could knock their legs from under them - they have
such a tenuous touch on earth you'd have to guess
their brains were in their beaks which maybe sums up
the base nature of wisdom - a glimpse of the innate

shrouded in moon darting through water gasping for
its last touch of air in a slithery marsh -somewhere 
there is a store (a golden sump) of truths all life 
has gleaned about itself (indiana jones can't find it)
the querulous beak of the ibis is our frail best bet

Book: Shattered Sighs