Famous Icon Poems by Famous Poets

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

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You Thought I Was That Type

by Anna Akhmatova
 You thought I was that type:
That you could forget me,
And that I'd plead and weep
And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare,

Or that I'd ask the sorcerers
For some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift:
My precious perfumed handkerchief.

Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul
Vicarious tears or a single glance.

And I swear...Read more of this...

Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova
 Not under foreign skies
 Nor under foreign wings protected -
 I shared all this with my own people
 There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
 [1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her...Read more of this...

Icon !

by Majeed Amjad
Where is she … ?!

That girl who stood on these ramparts years ago

Statuesque … iconic …besieged by the world

A deity …  worshiped by the early glow of my dreams !

Where is she now ?

That crazy-headed rebellious Truth

With the restless, quivering eye lashes

Who came to refute the sham of this world.

 

Under these ramparts,

My breath is still patched and mended

By...Read more of this...

Supplication

by Constantine P Cavafy
 The sea took a sailor to its depths.--
His mother, unsuspecting, goes and lights

a tall candle before the Virgin Mary
for his speedy return and for fine weather --

and always she turns her ear to the wind.
But while she prays and implores,

the icon listens, solemn and sad,
knowing that the son she expects will no longer return....Read more of this...

Scars on Paper

by Marilyn Hacker
 An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...

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