Famous Damaged Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Damaged poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous damaged poems. These examples illustrate what a famous damaged poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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In The Baggage Room At Greyhound

by Allen Ginsberg
 I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal 
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky 
 waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart 
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in 
 the night-time red downtown heaven 
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering 
 these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty 
 of...Read more of this...

Insomniac

by Sylvia Plath
 The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of...Read more of this...

Call It Music

by Philip Levine
 Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in...Read more of this...

With No Experience In Such Matters

by Stephen Dunn
 To hold a damaged sparrow
under water until you feel it die
is to know a small something
about the mind; how, for example,
it blames the cat for the original crime,
how it wants praise for its better side.

And yet it's as human
as pulling the plug on your Dad
whose world has turned
to feces and fog, human as--
Well, let's admit, it's a mild thing
as...Read more of this...

The Cambaroora Star

by Henry Lawson
 So you're writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new 
To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; 
You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, 
But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. 
Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, 
I myself -- you mayn't...Read more of this...

Spring View

by Du Fu
 Country damaged mountains rivers here City spring grass trees deep Feel moment flower splash tears Regret parting bird startle heart Beacon fires join three months Family letters worth ten thousand metal White head scratch become thin Virtually about to not bear hairpin  The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain, In the city in...Read more of this...

Dreams Are Best

by Robert William Service
 I just think that dreams are best,
 Just to sit and fancy things;
 Give your gold no acid test,
Try not how your silver rings;
Fancy women pure and good,
 Fancy men upright and true:
 Fortressed in your solitude,
Let Life be a dream to you.

For I think that Thought is all;
 Truth's a minion of the mind;
 Love's ideal comes at...Read more of this...

In Childhood

by Kimiko Hahn
 things don't die or remain damaged 
but return: stumps grow back hands, 
a head reconnects to a neck, 
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic. 
Later this vision is not True: 
the grandmother remains dead 
not hibernating in a wolf's belly. 
Or the blue parakeet does not return 
from the little grave in the fern garden 
though one...Read more of this...

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