Famous Layer Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Layer poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous layer poems. These examples illustrate what a famous layer poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Carl Sandburg
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul...Read more of this...
by
Peter Orlovsky
Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired
& handsome felt,
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at
blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
of rain dribble thru this layer
down to the roots that will tickle my ear.
Hay grave, my toes need cutting so...Read more of this...
by
Du Fu
Solitary goose not drink peck Fly call sound miss flock Who remember one now shadow Mutual lose myriad layer cloud Look utmost seem as if look Distressed much like become hear Wild duck without state of mind Call voices also numerous and confused The solitary goose does not drink or eat, It flies about and calls,...Read more of this...
by
Judith Skillman
After they passed beneath us I could tell
more would be coming, beneath the sand,
under the bejeweled sky, under the first
layer of earth where water exists
in flutes and eddies. I lay there with you,
not wanting to leave your side even
for them, the miraculous creatures of sex
and sediment, the ones who obey currents
and ladders, blindly seeking out their own
individual...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
for T. P. Flanagan
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
What shall I do with this absurdity -
O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible -
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back
And had...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
The stars are filtering through a tree
outside in the moon's silent era.
Reality is moving layer over layer
like crystal spheres now called laws.
The future is right behind your head;
just over all horizons is the past.
The soul sits looking at its offer....Read more of this...
by
Pam Ayres
You know this world is complicated, imperfect and oppressed
And it’s not hard to feel timid, apprehensive and depressed.
It seems that all around us tides of questions ebb and flow
And people want solutions but they don’t know where to go.
Opinions abound but who is wrong and who is right.
People need a prophet, a diffuser of the light.
Someone they can turn to...Read more of this...
by
Jorie Graham
In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
on. How can it do this?
It collects its motes. It condenses its sound-
track, all the pyrric escapes, the pilgrimages
still unconsummated,
the turreted thoughts of sky it slightly liquefies
and droops, the hum of the yellowest day alive,
office-holders in their books,...Read more of this...
by
Mark Doty
Over the terminal,
the arms and chest
of the god
brightened by snow.
Formerly mercury,
formerly silver,
surface yellowed
by atmospheric sulphurs
acid exhalations,
and now the shining
thing's descendant.
Obscure passages,
dim apertures:
these clouded windows
show a few faces
or some empty car's
filmstrip of lit flames
--remember them
from school,
how they were supposed
to teach us something?--
waxy light hurrying
inches away...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
Of a certain upper-window light.
The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should wee which one would win,
We should see which one would be...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth;
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured,
Next his heart the fireside band
Of mother, father, sister, stand;
Names from awful childhood heard,
Throbs of a wild religion stirred,
Their good was heaven, their harm was vice,
Till Beauty came to snap all ties,
The maid, abolishing the past,
With lotus-wine obliterates
Dear memory's...Read more of this...
by
Sharmagne Leland-St John
I swim near summer shadows
glide over dappled shoals
keeping to the fluid shallows
reminiscent of the womb
where I learned to swallow
gulps
of tantalising air
in the amniotic sac
where I shed scales
preferring skin and
hanks of auburn hair
upon my head
where I dispensed
with fins and gills
grew hands and feet
with which to tread
and push away
from muddy banks
I've no desire to...Read more of this...
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