Famous Gesturing Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Cripple

by Carl Sandburg
 ONCE when I saw a cripple
Gasping slowly his last days with the white plague,
Looking from hollow eyes, calling for air,
Desperately gesturing with wasted hands
In the dark and dust of a house down in a slum,
I said to myself
I would rather have been a tall sunflower
Living in a country garden
Lifting a golden-brown face to the summer,
Rain-washed and dew-misted,
Mixed with the...Read more of this...

By Their Works

by Bob Hicok
 Who cleaned up the Last Supper?
These would be my people.
Maybe hung over, wanting
desperately a better job,
standing with rags 
in hand as the window 
beckons with hills 
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci, 
the blue robed apostle 
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they've made
of their faith. My God 
would put a busboy 
on earth to...Read more of this...

Questions of Travel

by Elizabeth Bishop
 There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams 
hurry too rapidly down to the sea, 
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops 
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, 
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. 
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, 
aren't waterfalls yet, 
in a quick age or so,...Read more of this...

Ancestors

by Siegfried Sassoon
BEHOLD these jewelled merchant Ancestors 
Foregathered in some chancellery of death;
Calm provident discreet they stroke their beards
And move their faces slowly in the gloom 
And barter monstrous wealth with speech subdued 5
Lustreless eyes and acquiescent lids.
And oft in pauses of their conference 
They listen to the measured breath of night¡¯s
Hushed sweep of wind aloft the swaying trees
In dimly gesturing gardens;...Read more of this...

A November Night

by Sara Teasdale
 There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street --
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
A necklace for my throat? I'd twist it round
And you could play with it. You smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose eyes the fairies live. . . . And see,
The...Read more of this...

I Have Started To Say

by Philip Larkin
 I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It's like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

All that's left to happen
Is some deaths (my own included).
Their order, and their manner,
Remain to be learnt....Read more of this...

North Country

by Kenneth Slessor
 North Country, filled with gesturing wood, 
With trees that fence, like archers' volleys, 
The flanks of hidden valleys 
Where nothing's left to hide 

But verticals and perpendiculars, 
Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling, 
Or fingers blindly feeling 
For what nobody cares; 

Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death, 
Stuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking, 
And trees whose...Read more of this...

The British

by A S J Tessimond
 We are a people living in shells and moving 
Crablike; reticent, awkward, deeply suspicious; 
Watching the world from a corner of half-closed eyelids, 
Afraid lest someone show that he hates or loves us, 
Afraid lest someone weep in the railway train. 

We are coiled and clenched like a foetus clad in armour. 
We hold our hearts for fear they...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 07: Midnight; bells toll and along the cloud-high towers

by Conrad Aiken
 Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of...Read more of this...

I Breathe Out - V. a Shoelace or a Zipper

by Razvan Tupa

in the sky above you morning shatters into millions of colored shoelaces;
you could take this as a promise, as the eroticism of space
ablaze high above your head, it would be too much but

otherwise the textile light of the welding torch
would wrap in a package what remains mine
not including the workers by the tramline gesturing obscenely at the women riding

that, too,...Read more of this...

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