Famous Hayden Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Hayden poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous hayden poems. These examples illustrate what a famous hayden poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...for Hayden Carruth
If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which mad...Read more of this...
by
Simic, Charles
...O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son
I
The icy evil that struck his father down
and ravished his mother into madness
trapped him in violence of a punished self
struggling to break free.
As Home Boy, as Dee-troit Red,
he fled his name, became the quarry of
his own obsessed pursuit.
He conked his hair and Lindy-hopped,
zoot-suited jiver, swingin...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...I
Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:
Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
horror the corposant and compass rose.
Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.
"10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
our an...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
H...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...(For Maia and Julie)
Drifting night in the Georgia pines,
coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is juba, night is congo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.
Night is an African juju man
weaving a wish and a weariness together
to make two wings.
O fly away home fly away
Do you remember Africa?
O cleave the air fly...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield--
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.
Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and nev...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...He writes by writing what he must. Death knell
Is what he's found in his first villanelle.
Credit: Copyright © 1995 by Hayden Carruth. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org...Read more of this...
by
Carruth, Hayden
...(And I, I am no longer of that world)
Naked, he lies in the blinded room
chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz
as never by any lover's cradling flesh.
Miles Davis coolly blows for him:
O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;
the red clay foxfire voice of Lady Day
(lady of the pure black magnolias)
sobsings her sorrow and loss and fare you well,
dryweeps...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...y moment.
Cheers, baby. Here's to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers
and falls back.
Credit: Copyright © 1995 by Hayden Carruth. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org...Read more of this...
by
Carruth, Hayden
...Steel doors – guillotine gates –
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.
Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall –
splotched green walls, high windows barred –
where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled
clasped ours ...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...oor and go walking
like James Wright across a meadow,
where I might touch a pony's ear and
break into blossom; or, like Hayden
Carruth, sustained by the sight
of cows grazing in pastures at night,
I'd stand speechless in the great darkness;
I'd even search on some well-traveled road
like Phil Levine in this week's New Yorker,
the poet driving his car to an orchard
outside the city where, for five dollars,
he fills a basket with goddamned apples....Read more of this...
by
Jones, Richard
...The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.
She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy wea...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that h...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
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