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Best Famous Urgency Poems

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

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Written by Robert William Service | Create an image from this poem

Courage

 Today I opened wide my eyes,
And stared with wonder and surprise,
To see beneath November skies
An apple blossom peer;
Upon a branch as bleak as night
It gleamed exultant on my sight,
A fairy beacon burning bright
Of hope and cheer.

"Alas!" said I, "poor foolish thing,
Have you mistaken this for Spring?
Behold, the thrush has taken wing,
And Winter's near."
Serene it seemed to lift its head:
"The Winter's wrath I do not dread,
Because I am," it proudly said,
"A Pioneer.

"Some apple blossom must be first,
With beauty's urgency to burst
Into a world for joy athirst,
And so I dare;
And I shall see what none shall see -
December skies gloom over me,
And mock them with my April glee,
And fearless fare.

"And I shall hear what none shall hear -
The hardy robin piping clear,
The Storm King gallop dark and drear
Across the sky;
And I shall know what none shall know -
The silent kisses of the snow,
The Christmas candles' silver glow,
Before I die.

"Then from your frost-gemmed window pane
One morning you will look in vain,
My smile of delicate disdain
No more to see;
But though I pass before my time,
And perish in the grale and grime,
Maybe you'll have a little rhyme
To spare for me."


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 Edgar Bowers | Create an image from this poem

Variations on an Elizabethan Theme

 Long days, short nights, this Southern summer 
Fixes the mind within its timeless place. 
 Athwart pale limbs the brazen hummer 
Hangs and is gone, warm sound its quickened space. 

 Butterfly weed and cardinal flower, 
Orange and red, with indigo the band, 
 Perfect themselves unto the hour. 
And blood suffused within the sunlit hand, 

 Within the glistening eye the dew, 
Are slow with their slow moving. Watch their passing, 
 As lightly the shade covers you: 
All colors and all shapes enrich its massing. 

 Once I endured such gentle season. 
Blood-root, trillium, sweet flag, and swamp aster— 
 In their mild urgency, the reason 
Knew each and kept each chosen from disaster. 

 Now even dusk destroys; the bright 
Leucotho? dissolves before the eyes 
 And poised upon the reach of light 
Leaves only what no reasoning dare surmise. 

 Dim isolation holds the sense 
Of being, intimate as breathing; around, 
 Voices, unmeasured and intense, 
Throb with the heart below the edge of sound.
Written by Kenneth Koch | Create an image from this poem

The Boiling Water

 A serious moment for the water is 
 when it boils
And though one usually regards it
 merely as a convenience
To have the boiling water
 available for bath or table
Occasionally there is someone
around who understands
The importance of this moment
 for the water—maybe a saint,
Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy 
 man, or just someone
 temporarily disturbed
With his mind "floating"in a
 sense, away from his deepest
Personal concerns to more
 "unreal" things...

A serious moment for the island 
 is when its trees
Begin to give it shade, and
 another is when the ocean
 washes
Big heavy things against its side.
 One walks around and looks at
 the island
But not really at it, at what is on
 it, and one thinks,
It must be serious, even, to be this
 island, at all, here.
Since it is lying here exposed to 
 the whole sea. All its
Moments might be serious. It is
 serious, in such windy weather,
 to be a sail
Or an open window, or a feather
 flying in the street...

Seriousness, how often I have
 thought of seriousness
And how little I have understood
 it, except this: serious is urgent
And it has to do with change. You
 say to the water,
It's not necessary to boil now,
 and you turn it off. It stops
Fidgeting. And starts to cool. You
 put your hand in it
And say, The water isn't serious
 any more. It has the potential,
However—that urgency to give
 off bubbles, to
Change itself to steam. And the
 wind,
When it becomes part of a
 hurricane, blowing up the 
 beach
And the sand dunes can't keep it 
 away.
Fainting is one sign of 
 seriousness, crying is another.
Shuddering all over is another
 one.

A serious moment for the
 telephone is when it rings.
And a person answers, it is
 Angelica, or is it you.

A serious moment for the fly is
 when its wings
Are moving, and a serious
 moment for the duck
Is when it swims, when it first
 touches water, then spreads
Its smile upon the water...

A serious moment for the match 
 is when it burst into flame...

Serious for me that I met you, and
 serious for you
That you met me, and that we do
 not know
If we will ever be close to anyone
 again. Serious the recognition
 of the probability
That we will, although time
 stretches terribly in
 between...
Written by Marge Piercy | Create an image from this poem

To the Pay Toilet

 You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her
shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.
She's supposed to pay for each of them
and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty
black or whatever the prevailing bottom is
getting thirty cents an hour to make sure
no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door.
Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources
for the greatest good of the smallest number
where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean
and at the end of the row one free toilet
oozes from under its crooked door,
while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies
wait and wait and wait to do
what only the dead find unnecessary.


Written by Lisa Zaran | Create an image from this poem

Subtraction Flower

 You could die for it-- 
love, 
or refuse it altogether 
and know nothing 
except the urgency 
of youth. Men 

have been 
solitary 
for ages 
carrying the 
stoniest of hearts 
in their broad chests 
while we women 

begin too early 
brush the brown leaves 
from our shoulders, go 
from bloom to fade 
as soon as 
we see the sunrise 

We let our eyes go first 
Then there is the limp lolling 
of our hearts from side to side 
the tongue we cut away 
the blind kiss on the backlash of night 
the giving giving giving of skin 

As women 
we blindly wish 
past the climax of passion 
as we vanish into a world of men 
whose ribcages we were scraped from 
Perhaps we are born of seeds 
our essence crawling up the stem 
to feed the bees. 

Perhaps 
every flower you see 
is a woman 
and when 
she's in bloom 
and when she is blooming 
red 
and when her leaves are wingbeats 
of green in the autumn wind 
beating wings of green, yes 
even as the wind tries to humiliate her 
it fails because 
she's in love 
and only she would die for it 

Copyright © Lisa Zaran, 2006
Written by Jean Ingelow | Create an image from this poem

Requiescat In Pace!

My heart is sick awishing and awaiting:
  The lad took up his knapsack, he went, he went his way;
And I looked on for his coming, as a prisoner through the grating
  Looks and longs and longs and wishes for its opening day.
On the wild purple mountains, all alone with no other,
  The strong terrible mountains he longed, he longed to be;
And he stooped to kiss his father, and he stooped to kiss his mother,
  And till I said, "Adieu, sweet Sir," he quite forgot me.
He wrote of their white raiment, the ghostly capes that screen them,
  Of the storm winds that beat them, their thunder-rents and scars,
And the paradise of purple, and the golden slopes atween them,
  And fields, where grow God's gentian bells, and His crocus stars.
He wrote of frail gauzy clouds, that drop on them like fleeces,
  And make green their fir forests, and feed their mosses hoar;
Or come sailing up the valleys, and get wrecked and go to pieces,
  Like sloops against their cruel strength: then he wrote no more.
O the silence that came next, the patience and long aching!
  They never said so much as "He was a dear loved son;"
Not the father to the mother moaned, that dreary stillness breaking:
  "Ah! wherefore did he leave us so—this, our only one."
They sat within, as waiting, until the neighbors prayed them,
  At Cromer, by the sea-coast, 'twere peace and change to be;
And to Cromer, in their patience, or that urgency affrayed them,
  Or because the tidings tarried, they came, and took me.
It was three months and over since the dear lad had started:
  On the green downs at Cromer I sat to see the view;
On an open space of herbage, where the ling and fern had parted,
  Betwixt the tall white lighthouse towers, the old and the new.
Below me lay the wide sea, the scarlet sun was stooping,
  And he dyed the waste water, as with a scarlet dye;
And he dyed the lighthouse towers; every bird with white wing swooping
  Took his colors, and the cliffs did, and the yawning sky.
Over grass came that strange flush, and over ling and heather,
  Over flocks of sheep and lambs, and over Cromer town;
And each filmy cloudlet crossing drifted like a scarlet feather
  Torn from the folded wings of clouds, while he settled down.
When I looked, I dared not sigh:—In the light of God's splendor,
  With His daily blue and gold, who am I? what am I?
But that passion and outpouring seemed an awful sign and tender,
  Like the blood of the Redeemer, shown on earth and sky.
O for comfort, O the waste of a long doubt and trouble!
  On that sultry August eve trouble had made me meek;
I was tired of my sorrow—O so faint, for it was double
  In the weight of its oppression, that I could not speak!
And a little comfort grew, while the dimmed eyes were feeding,
  And the dull ears with murmur of water satisfied;
But a dream came slowly nigh me, all my thoughts and fancy leading
  Across the bounds of waking life to the other side.
And I dreamt that I looked out, to the waste waters turning,
  And saw the flakes of scarlet from wave to wave tossed on;
And the scarlet mix with azure, where a heap of gold lay burning
  On the clear remote sea reaches; for the sun was gone.
Then I thought a far-off shout dropped across the still water—
  A question as I took it, for soon an answer came
From the tall white ruined lighthouse: "If it be the old man's daughter
  That we wot of," ran the answer, "what then—who's to blame?"
I looked up at the lighthouse all roofless and storm-broken:
  A great white bird sat on it, with neck stretched out to sea;
Unto somewhat which was sailing in a skiff the bird had spoken,
  And a trembling seized my spirit, for they talked of me.
I was the old man's daughter, the bird went on to name him;
  "He loved to count the starlings as he sat in the sun;
Long ago he served with Nelson, and his story did not shame him:
  Ay, the old man was a good man—and his work was done."
The skiff was like a crescent, ghost of some moon departed,
  Frail, white, she rocked and curtseyed as the red wave she crossed,
And the thing within sat paddling, and the crescent dipped and darted,
  Flying on, again was shouting, but the words were lost.
I said, "That thing is hooded; I could hear but that floweth
  The great hood below its mouth:" then the bird made reply.
"If they know not, more's the pity, for the little shrew-mouse knoweth,
  And the kite knows, and the eagle, and the glead and pye."
And he stooped to whet his beak on the stones of the coping;
  And when once more the shout came, in querulous tones he spake,
"What I said was 'more's the pity;' if the heart be long past hoping,
  Let it say of death, 'I know it,' or doubt on and break.
"Men must die—one dies by day, and near him moans his mother,
  They dig his grave, tread it down, and go from it full loth:
And one dies about the midnight, and the wind moans, and no other,
  And the snows give him a burial—and God loves them both.
"The first hath no advantage—it shall not soothe his slumber
  That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall keep;
For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall nought his quiet cumber,
  That in a golden mesh of HIS callow eaglets sleep.
"Men must die when all is said, e'en the kite and glead know it,
  And the lad's father knew it, and the lad, the lad too;
It was never kept a secret, waters bring it and winds blow it,
  And he met it on the mountain—why then make ado?"
With that he spread his white wings, and swept across the water,
  Lit upon the hooded head, and it and all went down;
And they laughed as they went under, and I woke, "the old man's daughter."
  And looked across the slope of grass, and at Cromer town.
And I said, "Is that the sky, all gray and silver-suited?"
  And I thought, "Is that the sea that lies so white and wan?
I have dreamed as I remember: give me time—I was reputed
  Once to have a steady courage—O, I fear 'tis gone!"
And I said, "Is this my heart? if it be, low 'tis beating
  So he lies on the mountain, hard by the eagles' brood;
I have had a dream this evening, while the white and gold were fleeting,
  But I need not, need not tell it—where would be the good?
"Where would be the good to them, his father and his mother?
  For the ghost of their dead hope appeareth to them still.
While a lonely watch-fire smoulders, who its dying red would smother,
  That gives what little light there is to a darksome hill?"
I rose up, I made no moan, I did not cry nor falter,
  But slowly in the twilight I came to Cromer town.
What can wringing of the hands do that which is ordained to alter?
  He had climbed, had climbed the mountain, he would ne'er come down.
But, O my first, O my best, I could not choose but love thee:
  O, to be a wild white bird, and seek thy rocky bed!
From my breast I'd give thee burial, pluck the down and spread above thee;
  I would sit and sing thy requiem on the mountain head.
Fare thee well, my love of loves! would I had died before thee!
  O, to be at least a cloud, that near thee I might flow,
Solemnly approach the mountain, weep away my being o'er thee,
  And veil thy breast with icicles, and thy brow with snow!

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry