Famous Holocaust Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Holocaust poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous holocaust poems. These examples illustrate what a famous holocaust poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ek the front.
Singer to children! Ours possessed
Sleep before noon--but thee,
Wakeful each midnight for the rest,
No holocaust shall free!
Yet they who use the Word assigned,
To hearten and make whole,
Not less than Gods have served mankind,
Though vultures rend their soul....Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...mundra, and Takee, and Wakatipu,
Toowoomba, Kaikoura are lost
From Onkaparinga to far Oamaru
All burn in this hell's holocaust!
Paramatta and Binnum are gone to their rest
In the vale of Tapanni Taroom,
Kawakawa, Deniliquin - all that was best
In the earth are but graves and a tomb!
Narrandera mourns, Cameron answers not
When the roll of the scathless we cry
Tongariro, Goondiwindi, Woolundunga, the spot
Is mute and forlorn where ye lie....Read more of this...
by
Twain, Mark
...now my gains.
Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost;
No wisdom with the folly dies.
Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust
Shall be my evening sacrifice!
Far more than all I dared to dream,
Unsought before my door I see;
On wings of fire and steeds of steam
The world's great wonders come to me,
And holier signs, unmarked before,
Of Love to seek and Power to save,—
The righting of the wronged and poor,
The man evolving from the slave;
And life, ...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...lover oft returned
To kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned,
Ere the wet seas had quenched that holocaust,
That self-fed flame, that passionate lustihead,
Ere grisly death with chill and nipping frost
Had withered up those lilies white and red
Which, while the boy would through the forest range,
Answered each other in a sweet antiphonal counter-change.
And when at dawn the wood-nymphs, hand-in-hand,
Threaded the bosky dell, their satyr spied
The boy's...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...he stain
Of crimson at the bosom of the slain,
And peaceful homes and fortunes ruined--lost
In smoldering embers of the holocaust.
Yet on and on, through years of gloom and strife,
Our country struggled into stronger life;
Till colonies, like footprints in the sand,
Marked Freedom's pathway winding through the land--
And not the footprints to be swept away
Before the storm we hatched in Boston Bay,--
But footprints where the path of war begun
That led to Bunker Hill and Lexin...Read more of this...
by
Riley, James Whitcomb
...n the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat....Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...ution
Time has taken, and soon will be gone
Cambridge, Princeton and M.I.T.,
Nalanda, Athens and Alexandria
all for the holocaust
of civilization —
To whom shall we pray
when our vision has faded
but the world-destroyer,
the liberator, the purifier?
But great is the realm
of the world-creator,
the world-sustainer
from whom we come,
in whom we move
and have our being,
about us, within us
the wonders of wisdom,
the trees and the fountains,
the stars and the mountains,
all the ...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...No smoke ascends above my holocaust of crime: could
man ask more? This hand, which man's injustice raises
to my head, no comfort brings, even though it touch the
hem of saintly robes....Read more of this...
by
Khayyam, Omar
...,
Our long labour
Dust to the core?
To what far, fair land
Borne on the wind
What winged seed
Or spark of fire
From holocaust
To kindle a star?...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...ej's waves
With scarlet stain, I know;
Indus' borders yawn with graves,
Yet, command me go !
Though rank and high the holocaust
Of nations, steams to heaven,
Glad I'd join the death-doomed host,
Were but the mandate given.
Passion's strength should nerve my arm,
Its ardour stir my life,
Till human force to that dread charm
Should yield and sink in wild alarm,
Like trees to tempest-strife.
If, hot from war, I seek thy love,
Darest thou turn aside ?
Darest thou, then, my ...Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Charlotte
...he worst is over.
The worst is yet to come.
1--...is the question asked by Peter Schwenger in Letter Bomb.
Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word.
2--...is from Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima....Read more of this...
by
Forche, Carolyn
...cifixes in Ouagadougou, and the Parthenon
was already in ruins.
That year, thousands and thousands of Jews
from the Holocaust were already — were
still ¬— busy living their lives;
while gnawed by self-doubt, Rilke couldn’t
write a line for weeks inVienna’s Victorgasse,
and fishermen drowned off Finnish coasts,
and lovers kissed for the very first time,
while in Kashmir an old woman fell asleep,
her cheek on her good husband's belly.
And all along that year the w...Read more of this...
by
Bosselaar, Laure-Anne
...Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathr...Read more of this...
by
Amichai, Yehuda
...Sacrifice I'le lay
Upon thine Altar, Soul and Body pay;
Thou shalt my Pleasure, my Employment be,
My All I'le make a Holocaust to thee.
The Deity that ever does attend
Prayers so sincere, to mine did condescend.
I writ, and the Judicious prais'd my Pen:
Could any doubt Insuing Glory then ?
What pleasing Raptures fill'd my Ravisht Sense ?
How strong, how Sweet, Fame, was thy Influence ?
And thine, False Hope, that to my flatter'd sight
Didst Glories represent so Nea...Read more of this...
by
Killigrew, Anne
...We who give ourselves up to the will of wine offer
with joy our souls in holocaust to the laughing lips of
the juice divine. Oh! rapturous sight! Our cup-bearer
holds in one hand the neck of the flask and in the other
the cup overflowing, as if inviting us to receive the
purest of the blood!...Read more of this...
by
Khayyam, Omar
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