Famous Khaki Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Khaki poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous khaki poems. These examples illustrate what a famous khaki poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Yeats, William Butler
...ing in grass-green Avalon.
Am I a great Lord Chancellor
That slept upon the Sack?
Commanding officer that tore
The khaki from his back?
Or am I de Valera,
Or the King of Greece,
Or the man that made the motors?
Ach, call me what you please!
Here's a Montenegrin lute,
And its old sole string
Makes me sweet music
And I delight to sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.
With boys and girls about him.
With any sort of clothes,
With a hat out of fashion,
W...Read more of this...
by
Sassoon, Siegfried
...ke no more
Attractive attitudes! Dress by the right!
The luminous rich colours that you wore
Have changed to hueless khaki in the night.
Magic? What’s magic got to do with you?
There’s no such thing! Blood’s red, and skies are blue.’
They gasped and sweated, marching up and down.
I drilled them till they cursed my raucous shout.
Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.
Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out.
‘Left, right! Press o...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...ke my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they b...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...een one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drin...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...
In the drowsy days on escort, riding slowly half asleep,
With the endless line of waggons stretching back,
While the khaki soldiers travel like a mob of travelling sheep,
Plodding silent on the never-ending track,
While the constant snap and sniping of the foe you never see
Makes you wonder will your turn come -- when and how?
As the Mauser ball hums past you like a vicious kind of bee --
Oh! we're going on a long job now.
When the dash and the excitement and th...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...en passing by--
mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs--
and about myself,
a kind of composition in blue and khaki,
and, now that I had poured
some water into the glass, milky-green....Read more of this...
by
Murray, Les
...ice it less.
To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.
Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.
Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as e...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...ng,
Going along,
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad—
The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.
Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.”
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.
I heard one say, “I am ready to be killed.”...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...'s bound to be fighting,
And when there's no fighting, it's Ireland no more!
Ireland no more!
The fashion's all for khaki now,
But once through France we went
Full-dressed in scarlet Army cloth,
The English-left at Ghent.
They're fighting on our side to-day
But, before they changed their clothes,
The half of Europe knew our fame,
As all of Ireland knows!
Old Days! The wild geese are flying,
Head to the sform as they faced it before!
For where there are Irish the...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...he crimson wrecks of pride;
With faces seared, and cheeks red smeared, and haunting eyes of woe,
And clotted holes the khaki couldn't hide.
Oh, the clammy brow of anguish! the livid, foam-flecked lips!
The reeling ranks of ruin swept along!
The limb that trailed, the hand that failed, the bloody finger tips!
And oh, the dreary rhythm of their song!
"They left us on the veldt-side, but we felt we couldn't stop
On this, our England's crowning festal day;
We're the men ...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...vely still, yet not the same.
The novices in fluttering gown
No longer fill the ancient town,
But fighting men in khaki drest--
And in the Schools the wounded rest.
Ah, far away, 'neath stranger skies
Full many a son of Oxford lies,
And whispers from his warrior grave,
"I died to keep the faith you gave."
The mother mourns, but does not fail,
Her courage and her love prevail
O'er sorrow, and her spirit hears
The promise of triumphant years.
Then sing, ...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...igating himself.
Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,
not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,
khaki-pants red ****** like you or me.
What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,
plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!"
It was mashing up my house and my family.
I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup
or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain;
all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.
You saw them minis...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...er America."
She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.
She was a black umbrella blown inside out
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin
transfixed by arrows ...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...'
'Of kinds,' said she, 'I've only two,'
And took the bundles down;
And one was coloured azure blue,
And one was khaki brown.
With doubt I scratched my hoary head;
The quality was right;
The size too, yet I gravely said:
'Too bad you haven't white.'
That pretty maid had sunny hair,
Her gaze was free from guile,
And while I hesitated there
She watched me with a smile.
Then as I went to take the blue
She said 'Non' meaning no.
'Ze khaki ones are bes...Read more of this...
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