Best Famous Spills Poems

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

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

• All Famous Spills Poems

Written by Robert Frost | Mending Wall Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Written by Joseph Brodsky | I Sit By The Window I said fate plays a game without a score, and who needs fish if you've got caviar? The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass. I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen. When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often. I said the forest's only part of a tree. Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee? Sick of the dust raised by the modern era, the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire. I sit by the window. The dishes are done. I was happy here. But I won't be again. I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear, and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer- o Euclid thought the vanishing point became wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time. I sit by the window. And while I sit my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit. I said that the leaf may destory the bud; what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud; that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain nature spills the seeds of trees in vain. I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees. My heavy shadow's my squat company. My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, but at least no chorus can ever sing it back. That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders no one--no one's legs rest on my sholders. I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express, the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash. A loyal subject of these second-rate years, I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, and may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation. I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Written by Allen Ginsberg | Who Runs America? Oil brown smog over Denver Oil red dung colored smoke level to level across the horizon blue tainted sky above Oil car smog gasoline hazing red Denver's day December bare trees sticking up from housetop streets Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over radar wheels, black smoke drifts from tailfins Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains Oil from Texas, Bahrein, Venezuela Mexico Oil that turns General Motors revs up Ford lights up General Electric, oil that crackles thru International Business Machine computers, charges dynamos for ITT sparks Western Electric runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses, rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles Chrysler engines shoots thru Texaco pipelines blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from Standard of California derricks offshore.

Written by William Butler Yeats | Meditations In Time Of Civil War I. Ancestral Houses Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills And never stoop to a mechanical Or servile shape, at others' beck and call. Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung Had he not found it certain beyond dreams That out of life's own self-delight had sprung The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, And not a fountain, were the symbol which Shadows the inherited glory of the rich. Some violent bitter man, some powerful man Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known; But when the master's buried mice can play. And maybe the great-grandson of that house, For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse. O what if gardens where the peacock strays With delicate feet upon old terraces, Or else all Juno from an urn displays Before the indifferent garden deities; O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease And Childhood a delight for every sense, But take our greatness with our violence? What if the glory of escutcheoned doors, And buildings that a haughtier age designed, The pacing to and fro on polished floors Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined With famous portraits of our ancestors; What if those things the greatest of mankind Consider most to magnify, or to bless, But take our greatness with our bitterness? II. My House An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower, A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall, An acre of stony ground, Where the symbolic rose can break in flower, Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable, The sound of the rain or sound Of every wind that blows; The stilted water-hen Crossing Stream again Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows; A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone, A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth, A candle and written page. Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on In some like chamber, shadowing forth How the daemonic rage Imagined everything. Benighted travellers From markets and from fairs Have seen his midnight candle glimmering. Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms Gathered a score of horse and spent his days In this tumultuous spot, Where through long wars and sudden night alarms His dwinding score and he seemed castaways Forgetting and forgot; And I, that after me My bodily heirs may find, To exalt a lonely mind, Befitting emblems of adversity. III. My Table Two heavy trestles, and a board Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword, By pen and paper lies, That it may moralise My days out of their aimlessness. A bit of an embroidered dress Covers its wooden sheath. Chaucer had not drawn breath When it was forged. In Sato's house, Curved like new moon, moon-luminous It lay five hundred years. Yet if no change appears No moon; only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art. Our learned men have urged That when and where 'twas forged A marvellous accomplishment, In painting or in pottery, went From father unto son And through the centuries ran And seemed unchanging like the sword. Soul's beauty being most adored, Men and their business took Me soul's unchanging look; For the most rich inheritor, Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door, That loved inferior art, Had such an aching heart That he, although a country's talk For silken clothes and stately walk. Had waking wits; it seemed Juno's peacock screamed. IV. My Descendants Having inherited a vigorous mind From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams And leave a woman and a man behind As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that. And what if my descendants lose the flower Through natural declension of the soul, Through too much business with the passing hour, Through too much play, or marriage with a fool? May this laborious stair and this stark tower Become a roofless min that the owl May build in the cracked masonry and cry Her desolation to the desolate sky. The primum Mobile that fashioned us Has made the very owls in circles move; And I, that count myself most prosperous, Seeing that love and friendship are enough, For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house And decked and altered it for a girl's love, And know whatever flourish and decline These stones remain their monument and mine. V. The Road at My Door An affable Irregular, A heavily-built Falstaffian man, Comes cracking jokes of civil war As though to die by gunshot were The finest play under the sun. A brown Lieutenant and his men, Half dressed in national uniform, Stand at my door, and I complain Of the foul weather, hail and rain, A pear-tree broken by the storm. I count those feathered balls of soot The moor-hen guides upon the stream. To silence the envy in my thought; And turn towards my chamber, caught In the cold snows of a dream. VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the state. We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in he empty house of the stare. A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare. We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More Substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. VII. I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone, A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all, Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable, A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by. Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind; Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye. 'Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up, 'Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace, The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop, Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face, Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay. Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes, Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs. The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies, Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs, Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool Where even longing drowns under its own excess; Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness. The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine, The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace, Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean, Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie, Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone, Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency, The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon. I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth In something that all others understand or share; But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth A company of friends, a conscience set at ease, It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy, The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

Written by Jackie Kay | The Mother Poem (two) I always wanted to give birth Do that incredible natural thing That women do-I nearly broke down When I heard we couldn't And then my man said to me Well there's always adoption (we didn't have test tubes and the rest then) and well even in the early sixties there was something Scandalous about adopting Telling the world your secret failure Bringing up an alien child Who knew what it would turn out to be? But I wanted a baby badly Didn't need to come from my womb Or his seed for me to love it And I had sisters who looked just like me Didn't need carbon copy features Blueprints for generations It was my baby a baby a baby I wanted So I watched my child grow Always the first to hear her in the night All this umbilical knot business is Nonsense-the men can afford deeper sleeps That's all. I listened to hear her talk And when she did I heard my voice under hers And now some of her mannerisms Crack me up All them stories could have really had me Believing unless you are breast fed You'll never be close and the rest My daughter's warmth spills over me Leaves a gap When she's gone I think of her mother. She remembers how I read her All those newspaper and magazine Cuttings about adoption She says her head's an encyclopedia Of sob stories: the ones that were never Told and committed suicide on their wedding nights I always believed in the telling anyhow You can't keep something like that secret I wanted her to think of her other mother Out there thinking that child I had will be Eight today nine today all the way up to God knows when. I told my daughter; I bet your mother's never missed your birthday How could she Now when people say ah but It's not like having your own child though is it I say of course it is what else is it She's my child I have brought her up Told her stories wept at losses Laughed at her pleasures she is mine. Yes. Well maybe that is why I don't Like all this talk about her being black I brought her up as my own As I would any other child Colour matters to the nuttters But she says my daughter says It matters to her. I suppose there would have been things I couldn't have understood with any child We knew she was coloured They told us they had no babies at first And I chanced to say it didn't matter What colour it was and then they Said oh well are you sure in that case We have a baby for you To think she wasn't even thought of as a baby! My baby my baby.

Written by Philip Levine | The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

Written by Ruth Stone | Repetition of Words and Weather A basket of dirty clothes spills all day long down the mountain beating the rocks with a horrible washer-woman's cry. Now two riders go by horseback on the dirt road. Young women talking of antique latches, blind to the dirty linen, smells of urine, bedsores, bowels of old women left on their backs, fat and lye, lies of doctoring men. Strange weather mid-summer is summer spent. I open a book of poems. All lies on the psalter, I say, the dead are silent. The riders come back chatting like birds. What would I not give to return that way. Their horses trot in a break of sunlight over the road. And I think, what's done is done. It won't be changed with words.

Written by John Betjeman | Cornish Cliffs Those moments, tasted once and never done, Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun. A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun- The seagulls plane and circle out of sight Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted height, The veined sea-campion buds burst into white And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide To where the slate falls sheer into the tide. More than in gardened Surrey, nature spills A wealth of heather, kidney-vetch and squills Over these long-defended Cornish hills. A gun-emplacement of the latest war Looks older than the hill fort built before Saxon or Norman headed for the shore. And in the shadowless, unclouded glare Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where A misty sea-line meets the wash of air. Nut-smell of gorse and honey-smell of ling Waft out to sea the freshness of the spring On sunny shallows, green and whispering. The wideness which the lark-song gives the sky Shrinks at the clang of sea-birds sailing by Whose notes are tuned to days when seas are high. From today's calm, the lane's enclosing green Leads inland to a usual Cornish scene- Slate cottages with sycamore between, Small fields and tellymasts and wires and poles With, as the everlasting ocean rolls, Two chapels built for half a hundred souls.

Written by Marge Piercy | You Ask Why Sometimes I Say Stop You ask why sometimes I say stop why sometimes I cry no while I shake with pleasure. What do I fear, you ask, why don't I always want to come and come again to that molten deep sea center where the nerves fuse open and the brain and body shine with a black wordless light fluorescent and heaving like plankton. If you turn over the old refuse of sexual slang, the worn buttons of language, you find men talk of spending and women of dying. You come in a torrent and ease into limpness. Pleasure takes me farther and farther from the shore in a series of breakers, each towering higher before it crashes and spills flat. I am open then as a palm held out, open as a sunflower, without crust, without shelter, without skin, hideless and unhidden. How can I let you ride so far into me and not fear? Helpless as a burning city, how can I ignore that the extremes of pleasure are fire storms that leave a vacuum into which dangerous feelings (tenderness, affection, l o v e) may rush like gale force winds.

Written by Federico García Lorca | Lament For Ignacio Sanchez Mejias 1. Cogida and death At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone. The wind carried away the cottonwool at five in the afternoon. And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel at five in the afternoon. Now the dove and the leopard wrestle at five in the afternoon. And a thigh with a desolated horn at five in the afternoon. The bass-string struck up at five in the afternoon. Arsenic bells and smoke at five in the afternoon. Groups of silence in the corners at five in the afternoon. And the bull alone with a high heart! At five in the afternoon. When the sweat of snow was coming at five in the afternoon, when the bull ring was covered with iodine at five in the afternoon. Death laid eggs in the wound at five in the afternoon. At five in the afternoon. At five o'clock in the afternoon. A coffin on wheels is his bed at five in the afternoon. Bones and flutes resound in his ears at five in the afternoon. Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead at five in the afternoon. The room was iridiscent with agony at five in the afternoon. In the distance the gangrene now comes at five in the afternoon. Horn of the lily through green groins at five in the afternoon. The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon. At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon! 2. The Spilled Blood I will not see it! Tell the moon to come, for I do not want to see the blood of Ignacio on the sand. I will not see it! The moon wide open. Horse of still clouds, and the grey bull ring of dreams with willows in the barreras. I will not see it! Let my memory kindle! Warm the jasmines of such minute whiteness! I will not see it! The cow of the ancient world passed har sad tongue over a snout of blood spilled on the sand, and the bulls of Guisando, partly death and partly stone, bellowed like two centuries sated with threading the earth. No. I will not see it! Ignacio goes up the tiers with all his death on his shoulders. He sought for the dawn but the dawn was no more. He seeks for his confident profile and the dream bewilders him He sought for his beautiful body and encountered his opened blood Do not ask me to see it! I do not want to hear it spurt each time with less strength: that spurt that illuminates the tiers of seats, and spills over the cordury and the leather of a thirsty multiude. Who shouts that I should come near! Do not ask me to see it! His eyes did not close when he saw the horns near, but the terrible mothers lifted their heads. And across the ranches, an air of secret voices rose, shouting to celestial bulls, herdsmen of pale mist. There was no prince in Sevilla who could compare to him, nor sword like his sword nor heart so true. Like a river of lions was his marvellous strength, and like a marble toroso his firm drawn moderation. The air of Andalusian Rome gilded his head where his smile was a spikenard of wit and intelligence. What a great torero in the ring! What a good peasant in the sierra! How gentle with the sheaves! How hard with the spurs! How tender with the dew! How dazzling the fiesta! How tremendous with the final banderillas of darkness! But now he sleeps without end. Now the moss and the grass open with sure fingers the flower of his skull. And now his blood comes out singing; singing along marshes and meadows, sliden on frozen horns, faltering soulles in the mist stoumbling over a thousand hoofs like a long, dark, sad tongue, to form a pool of agony close to the starry Guadalquivir. Oh, white wall of Spain! Oh, black bull of sorrow! Oh, hard blood of Ignacio! Oh, nightingale of his veins! No. I will not see it! No chalice can contain it, no swallows can drink it, no frost of light can cool it, nor song nor deluge og white lilies, no glass can cover mit with silver. No. I will not see it! 3. The Laid Out Body Stone is a forehead where dreames grieve without curving waters and frozen cypresses. Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets. I have seen grey showers move towards the waves raising their tender riddle arms, to avoid being caught by lying stone which loosens their limbs without soaking their blood. For stone gathers seed and clouds, skeleton larks and wolves of penumbra: but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire, only bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls. Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone. All is finished. What is happening! Contemplate his face: death has covered him with pale sulphur and has place on him the head of dark minotaur. All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth. The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest, and Love, soaked through with tears of snow, warms itself on the peak of the herd. What is they saying? A stenching silence settles down. We are here with a body laid out which fades away, with a pure shape which had nightingales and we see it being filled with depthless holes. Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true! Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner, nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent. Here I want nothing else but the round eyes to see his body without a chance of rest. Here I want to see those men of hard voice. Those that break horses and dominate rivers; those men of sonorous skeleton who sing with a mouth full of sun and flint. Here I want to see them. Before the stone. Before this body with broken reins. I want to know from them the way out for this captain stripped down by death. I want them to show me a lament like a river wich will have sweet mists and deep shores, to take the body of Ignacio where it looses itself without hearing the double planting of the bulls. Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull, loses itself in the night without song of fishes and in the white thicket of frozen smoke. I don't want to cover his face with handkerchiefs that he may get used to the death he carries. Go, Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies! 4. Absent Soul The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree, nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house. The child and the afternoon do not know you because you have dead forever. The shoulder of the stone does not know you nor the black silk, where you are shuttered. Your silent memory does not know you because you have died forever The autumn will come with small white snails, misty grapes and clustered hills, but no one will look into your eyes because you have died forever. Because you have died for ever, like all the dead of the earth, like all the dead who are forgotten in a heap of lifeless dogs. Nobady knows you. No. But I sing of you. For posterity I sing of your profile and grace. Of the signal maturity of your understanding. Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth. Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety. It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure. I sing of his elegance with words that groan, and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.