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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Apologies For Absence

by Barry Tebb
 Sorry, 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,...Read more of this...

A Fine Madness

by Barry Tebb
 Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?

Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station

Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation

Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness

Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Val?ry.



London has everything except my bardic inspiration

I’ve only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles

Its bravuras down every wind,...Read more of this...

Together

by Barry Tebb
 for Brenda



Your blue dressing-gown

Lying on the chair back

Like a tired arm....Read more of this...

Letters To Friends

by Barry Tebb
 I


Eddie Linden

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page 

And at your age the wonder 

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under 

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...

Incompatabilities

by Barry Tebb
 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 black blazer

Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:

Your home...Read more of this...

Poem To Be Placed In A Bottle And Cast Out To Sea

by Barry Tebb
 for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further...’





Dear _______ and here’s where the problem begins

For who shall I address this letter to?

Friends are few and very special, muses in the main

I must confess, the first I lost just fifty years ago.

Perhaps the best.



I searched for years and wrote en route

‘Bridge Over the Aire’ after that...Read more of this...

To Brenda Williams ‘writing Against The Grain'

by Barry Tebb
 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...Read more of this...

Without The Wherewithall

by Barry Tebb
 To Thushari Williams 

Dear Thushie, the six months you spent with 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...Read more of this...

You

by Barry Tebb
 “Remember, you loved me, when we were young, one day”



The words of the song in Tauber’s mellifluous tenor

Haunt my nights and days, make me tremble when I hear

Your voice on the phone, sadden me when I can’t make into your smile

The pucker of your lips, the gleam in your eye.



The day we met is with me still, you asked...Read more of this...

Three Songs For Mayday Morning

by Barry Tebb
 ( I )


for ‘JC’ of the TLS

Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam

Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there

Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,

Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone – 

Vague sad memories of mam n’dad

Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.

Hosannas of sweet May mornings

Whitsun glory of lilac blooming

Sixty years on I run and run

From death,...Read more of this...

Bride Of The Wind

by Barry Tebb
 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...Read more of this...

To Brenda Williams On Her Fiftieth Birthday

by Barry Tebb
 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 crossing to the stunted bridge

Caparisoned with carnivals...Read more of this...

Letter From Leeds

by Barry Tebb
 Would ‘any woman’ find me difficult to live with?

My tastes are simple: space for several thousand books,

The smoke from my pipe stuffed with aromatic Balkan Sobranie, 

A leftover from the Sixties, frequent brief absences to fulfil

My duties as a carer, unending phone calls

And the unenviable reputation as England’s worst or best complainer,

"Treading on toes or keeping people on their...Read more of this...

To The Memory Of My Mother

by Barry Tebb
 This is one spring you will not see.

The fifty roses of your spray

Smelt soft across that February day

Where trees, heavy as only crematoria

Can bear, sloped down the fallen banks

To where we waited in 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...Read more of this...

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