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Best Famous What's Happening Poems

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

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Written by Pablo Neruda | Create an image from this poem

Love

 What's wrong with you, with us, 
what's happening to us? 
Ah our love is a harsh cord 
that binds us wounding us 
and if we want 
to leave our wound, 
to separate, 
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us 
to drain our blood and burn together. 

What's wrong with you? I look at you 
and I find nothing in you but two eyes 
like all eyes, a mouth 
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful, 
a body just like those that have slipped 
beneath my body without leaving any memory. 

And how empty you went through the world 
like a wheat-colored jar 
without air, without sound, without substance! 
I vainly sought in you 
depth for my arms 
that dig, without cease, beneath the earth: 
beneath your skin, beneath your eyes, 
nothing, 
beneath your double breast scarcely 
raised 
a current of crystalline order 
that does not know why it flows singing. 
Why, why, why, 
my love, why?


Written by Philip Larkin | Create an image from this poem

The Whitsun Weddings

 That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
 Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday 
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran 
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence 
The river's level drifting breadth began, 
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept 
 For miles inland, 
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. 
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and 
Canals with floatings of industrial froth; 
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped 
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass 
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth 
Until the next town, new and nondescript, 
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
 The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
 Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. 
 Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed 
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days 
Were coming to an end. All down the line 
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; 
The last confetti and advice were thrown, 
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define 
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
 The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say 
 I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way. 
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And 
someone running up to bowl - and none 
Thought of the others they would never meet 
Or how their lives would all contain this hour. 
I thought of London spread out in the sun, 
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across 
 Bright knots of rail 
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss 
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail 
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled 
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower 
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Written by Bob Hicok | Create an image from this poem

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem

 My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
 of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
 at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
 staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
 is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
 of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
 I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
 a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
 kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
 anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
 to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
 My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
 something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
 or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
 she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
 somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
 in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
 and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
 in each place and forever.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry