Famous Brenda Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Brenda poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous brenda poems. These examples illustrate what a famous brenda poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Tebb, Barry
...e share our love of Joyce the Aire becomes the Liffey.
All my three muses have abandoned me. Daisy in Asia,
Brenda protesting outside the Royal Free, Barbara seeing clients at the C.A.B.
Past Saltaire’s Mill, the world’s eighth wonder,
The new electric train whisperglides on wet rails
Past Shipley’s fairy glen and other tourist trails
Past Kirkstall’s abandoned abbey and redundant forge
To Grandma Wild’s in Keighley where I sit and gorge.
I...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...rry, Neil Oram (with an orange in my pocket)
I can’t make ,your loch-side commune by bonny Drummadrochit.
Sorry Brenda Williams, I can’t share your park bench protest near the Royal Free
At sixty I need a fire and slippers, -4 outside just isn’t me.
Sorry, Chris Torrance, I can’t make your Welsh eyrie
Just spelling Gymmercher Isaf Pontneathvaughan quite fazes me.
Sorry, Seamus Famous, your hide away in Dublin Bay
No doubt is bloody grand but I can’t f...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...for Brenda
Both had come with no gardener but the soul;
I had myself expressed them in weariness,
Like the last drop of milk from your tired breast.
The red rose was no rose for me.
My black rose shone in a silver dawn
In the throat of the wind.
On the tongue of the wind
I taste your spirit;
I will bear you on my toes
To the roof of the...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...For Brenda Williams
La lune diminue; divin septembre.
Divine September the moon wanes.
Pierre Jean Jouve
Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:
This is one September I shall not forget.
The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked
And the floors waxed, but I never shone.
The stripes of the red and bl...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ts-
When visiting times are readily extended to encompass
My moorland walks and journeys to the capital
When I visit Brenda Williams, England’s leading protest poet.
In an Eden garden which spreads its lawned sleeves
To envelop my tobacco smoke which irritates everyone
Or is it a displacement onto the smoker
As I ecstasise the red and yellow splendour of the red hot poker
Defiantly erect among the flowering robes of magnolia?
Here we reminisce of long ago days w...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...hinder
Branches bursting with semen
Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting
Us homeward to the beckoning moors.
II
Brenda Williams
Leeds voices soothe the turbulence
‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lastingly lilt
From cradle to grave, from backstreet
On the social, our son, beat his way
To Eton, Balliol, to Calcatta’s Shantiniketan
And all the way back to a locked ward.
While I in the meantime fondly fiddled
With rhyme and unreason, publishing pamphlets
And Leeds...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...pelled from grammar school wearing a poncho
Hand-made from an army blanket
Working a stall in Kirkgate Market.
Brenda Williams, po?te maudit if ever,
By then installed as muse number three
Grew sadly jealous for the only time
In thirty-seven years: muse number two
Passed into the blue
There is another muse, who makes me chronologically confused.
Barbara, who overlaps both two and three
And still is there, somewhere in Leeds.
Who does remember me and...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...for Brenda Williams
The dawn cracked with ice, with fire grumbling in the grate,
With ire in the homes we had left, but still somehow
We made a nook in the crooked corner of Hall Ings,
A Wordsworthian dream with sheep nibbling by every crumbling
Dry-stone wall, smoke inching from the chimney pot beside the
Turning lane, the packhorse road with every ston...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...
A thousand times better than snide attacks in the TLS
By ‘JC’. **** you, Jock, you should be ashamed,
Attacking Brenda Williams, who had a background
Worse than yours, an alcoholic schizophrenic father
And an Irish immigrant mother who died when Brenda was fifteen
But still she managed to read Proust on her day off
As a library girl, turned down by David Jenkins,
‘As rising star of the left’ for a place at Leeds
To read theology started her as a protest poet
Si...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance’ how many poets
Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail
Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places - fragile as bone china,
Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight round a cup, sitting in a pool
Of midnight light, your cats stretched flat on ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...The years become you as Oxford becomes you,
As you became Oxford through the protest years;
From Magdalen’s grey gargoyles to its bridge in May,
From the cement buttresses of Wellington Square
To Balliol, Balliol in the rain.
The years become you as the Abbey Road becomes you,
As you became that road through silent years,
From the famous cross...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...the chapel, me
Clutching Father Kevin’s hand, remembering
My given grace and faith renewed
In answer to my prayers, Brenda in tears,
And Joyce the sister of my years, Kim
And the others from the Home, where five
Long years you waited for this day,
Of all, the most important. Visits, letters,
Phone calls far too few, until we knew
When your last days began and for sixteen
Hours we sat, but still your will to live
Went on until our backs were turned
And then yo...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...for Brenda
Your blue dressing-gown
Lying on the chair back
Like a tired arm....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...th us
Will never be forgotten, the long days you laboured
In the care home, your care-worn comings home
To sit with Brenda Williams, po?te maudit sang pur,
Labouring together to bring to light poems buried alive
And turn them into a book, the living text
Proof enough of your divine gift as muse
And enchantress of both word and screen.
Now in far Indonesia you strive to strike a bargain
With an uncaring world, webmaster with magic fingertips
You engrave the wor...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...nd
Was set elsewhere end I was too immature to understand or care.
When I saw you again you had Sarah and I had Brenda, my wife-to-be;
Three decades of nightmare ahead with neither of our ‘adult children’
Quite right, both drink to excess and have been on wards.
Nor has your life been a total success, full-time teaching till you retired
Then Victim Support: where’s that sharp mind, that laughter and that passion?
And what have I to show?
A few pamphlets, a...Read more of this...
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