Famous Cracked Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Cracked poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cracked poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cracked poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Elizabeth Bishop
Now can you see the monument? It is of wood
built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
Each is turned half-way round so that
its corners point toward the sides
of the one below and the angles alternate.
Then on the topmost cube is set
a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood,
long petals of board, pierced...Read more of this...
by
Emanuel Xavier
It rained the day they buried Tito Puente
The eyes of drug dealers following me
as I walked through the streets
past shivering prostitutes
women of every sex
young boys full of piss
and lampposts like ghosts in the night
past Jimmy the hustler boy
with the really big dick
cracked out on the sidewalk
wrapped in a blanket donated by the trick
that also gave him genital...Read more of this...
by
John Wheelwright
For Horace Gregory
After rain, through afterglow, the unfolding fan
of railway landscape sidled onthe pivot
of a larger arc into the green of evening;
I remembered that noon I saw a gradual bud
still white; though dead in its warm bloom;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
And I wondered what surgery could recover
our lost, long stride of indolence and leisure
which is labor...Read more of this...
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
Of all the rides since the birth of time,
Told in story or sung in rhyme, -
On Apuleius' Golden Ass,
Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass,
Witch astride of a human back,
Islam's prophet on Al-Borak, -
The strangest ride that ever was sped
Was Ireson's, out from Marblehead!
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken. People use their own words.
Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2S O4, for musical notes,
but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure
have escaped...Read more of this...
by
Stanley Kunitz
My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.
The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road....Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
Beauty has a tarnished dress,
And a patchwork cloak of cloth
Dipped deep in mournfulness,
Striped like a moth.
Wet grass where it trails
Dyes it green along the hem;
She has seven silver veils
With cracked bells on them.
She is tired of all these--
Grey gauze, translucent lawn;
The broad cloak of Herakles.
Is tangled flame and fawn.
Water and...Read more of this...
by
Billy Jno Hope
folly cracked the mirror
a soul gasping wound
voodoo induced vertigo
psychedelic blackouts
in the cracks
between art and blasphemy
paralyzing paranoia of becoming
the vision that heals
cast shadows to douse the flames
starved enlightenment
i betrayed my muse
i wallowed in nostalgic fumes
blood clots from yesteryears insurrection mad dissident desire found wanting a rage dissipating in the twilight of friendship a facade evolved....Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
They should not have left him there alone,
Alone that is except for the cat.
He was only nine, not old enough
To be left alone in a basement flat,
Alone, that is, except for the cat.
A dog would have been a different thing,
A big gruff dog with slashing jaws,
But a cat with round eyes mad...Read more of this...
by
Hilda Doolittle
1.
Each of us like you
has died once,
has passed through drift of wood-leaves,
cracked and bent
and tortured and unbent
in the winter-frost,
the burnt into gold points,
lighted afresh,
crisp amber, scales of gold-leaf,
gold turned and re-welded
in the sun;
each of us like you
has died once,
each of us has crossed an old...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not
and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground
but they all know
that...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
"The aristocratic ne'er-do-well in Canada frequently finds his way
into the ranks of the Royal North-West Mounted Police." -- Extract.
Hark to the ewe that bore him:
"What has muddied the strain?
Never his brothers before him
Showed the hint of a stain."
Hark to the tups and wethers;
Hark to the old gray ram:
"We're all of us white,...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
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...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Through my bedroom window
The coal carts jolted over the cobbles
A slow heavy rhythm full,
Light and fast returning empty.
The coal office manager was a dwarf
With sixty year old skin
On a ten year old’s body and
Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.
The enormous shire horses neighed
In warning if you went near,
Their polished brasses gleaming,
Their worn blinkers waxed;
When they brought in lorries
A two...Read more of this...
by
Derek Walcott
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.
The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you...Read more of this...
by
Primo Levi
In the brutal nights we used to dream
Dense violent dreams,
Dreamed with soul and body:
To return; to eat; to tell the story.
Until the dawn command
Sounded brief, low
'Wstawac'
And the heart cracked in the breast.
Now we have found our homes again,
Our bellies are full,
We're through telling the story.
It's time. Soon we'll hear again
The strange command:
'Wstawac'
Translated by Ruth Feldman And Brian Swann...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn
Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs,
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about the streets, You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all....Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Orphée au bois du Caystre.")
{Bk. I. ii.}
Orpheus, through the hellward wood
Hurried, ere the eve-star glowed,
For the fauns' lugubrious hoots
Followed, hollow, from crookèd roots;
Aeschylus, where Aetna smoked,
Gods of Sicily evoked
With the flute, till sulphur taint
Dulled and lulled the echoes faint;
...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
People sit numbly at the counter
waiting for breakfast or service.
Today it's Hartford, Connecticut
more than twenty-five years after
the last death of Wallace Stevens.
I have come in out of the cold
and wind of a Sunday morning
of early March, and I seem to be
crying, but I'm only freezing
and unpeeled. The waitress brings
me...Read more of this...
by
Lam Quang My
Once drunk –
I wished to fish the moon
from out a glass of vodka
The vodka spilled
the moon cracked
Once in love
I dared not speak
I left –
with love locked in my heart.
Will I see the moon full ever again?
Will I ever be able to tell the truth?!
It happened once,
But only once.
Long ago
It happened once,
But only once.
When?...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
(a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
whose beat lies naked on a table
not to score in triumph on a line
no sensitive would put a nostril to
but simply to receive it as an
offering glimpsing the sacred there
poem probes the poet's once-intention
but each time said budges its truth
afresh (leaving...Read more of this...
by
William Ernest Henley
The beach was crowded. Pausing now and then,
He groped and fiddled doggedly along,
His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throng
The stony peevishness of sightless men.
He seemed scarce older than his clothes. Again,
Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song,
So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong,
You hardly could distinguish one in ten.
He stopped at last, and sat him...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
"Hae ye heard whit ma auld mither's postit tae me?
It fair maks me hamesick," says Private McPhee.
"And whit did she send ye?" says Private McPhun,
As he cockit his rifle and bleezed at a Hun.
"A haggis! A Haggis!" says Private McPhee;
"The brawest big haggis I ever did see.
And think! it's the morn when fond memory turns
Tae haggis and whuskey--the Birthday...Read more of this...
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