Famous Long Girl Poems

Famous Long Girl Poems. Long Girl Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Girl long poems

See also: Long Member Poems

 Tiny green birds skate over the surface of the room.
A naked girl prepares a basin with steaming water,
And in the corner away from the hearth, the red wheels
Of an up-ended chariot slowly turn.
After a long moment, the door to the other world opens
And the golden figure of a man appears. He stands
Ruddy as a salmon beside the niche where are kept
The keepsakes of the Prince of Earth; then sadly, drawing
A hammer out of his side, he advances to an oaken desk,
And being careful to strike in exact fury, pounds it to bits.
Another woman has by now taken her station
Beside the bubbling tub.
Her legs are covered with a silken blue fur,
Which in places above the knees
Grows to the thickness of a lion's mane.
The upper sphere of her chest
Is gathered into huge creases by two jeweled pins.
Transparent little boots reveal toes
Which an angel could want.
Beneath her on the floor a beautiful cinnamon cat
Plays with a bunch of yellow grapes, running
Its paws in and out like a boy being a silly king.
Her voice is round and white as she says:
'Your bath is ready, darling. Don't wait too long.'
But he has already drawn away to the window
And through its circular opening looks,
As a...
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 YES, write, if you want to, there's nothing like trying;
Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold?
I'll show you that rhyming's as easy as lying,
If you'll listen to me while the art I unfold.

Here's a book full of words; one can choose as he fancies,
As a painter his tint, as a workman his tool;
Just think! all the poems and plays and romances
Were drawn out of this, like the fish from a pool!

You can wander at will through its syllabled mazes,
And take all you want, not a copper they cost,--
What is there to hinder your picking out phrases
For an epic as clever as "Paradise Lost"?

Don't mind if the index of sense is at zero,
Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean;
Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero
Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine.

There are words so delicious their sweetness will smother
That boarding-school flavor of which we're afraid,
There is "lush"is a good one, and "swirl" is another,--
Put both in one stanza, its fortune is made.

With musical murmurs and rhythmical closes
You can cheat us of smiles when you've nothing to tell
You hand us a nosegay of milliner's roses, 
And we cry with delight, "Oh, how sweet they do smell!"

Perhaps you will...
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 ( I )


for ‘JC’ of the TLS

Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam

Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there

Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,

Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone – 

Vague sad memories of mam n’dad

Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.

Hosannas of sweet May mornings

Whitsun glory of lilac blooming

Sixty years on I run and run

From death, from loss, from everyone.

Which are the paths I never ventured down,

Or would they, too, be vain?

O for the secret anima of Leeds girlhood

A thousand times better than snide attacks in the TLS

By ‘JC’. Fuck you, Jock, you should be ashamed,

Attacking Brenda Williams, who had a background

Worse than yours, an alcoholic schizophrenic father

And an Irish immigrant mother who died when Brenda was fifteen

But still she managed to read Proust on her day off

As a library girl, turned down by David Jenkins,

‘As rising star of the left’ for a place at Leeds

To read theology started her as a protest poet

Sitting out on the English lawn, mistaken for a snow sculpture

In the depths of winter.

Her sit-in protest lasted seven months,

Months, eight hours a day, her libellous verse scorching

The academic groves of Leeds in sheets by the thousand,

Mailed through the university's internal post. She...
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 When the boys come out from Lac Labiche in the lure of the early Spring,
To take the pay of the "Hudson's Bay", as their fathers did before,
They are all a-glee for the jamboree, and they make the Landing ring
With a whoop and a whirl, and a "Grab your girl", and a rip and a skip and a roar.
For the spree of Spring is a sacred thing, and the boys must have their fun;
Packer and tracker and half-breed Cree, from the boat to the bar they leap;
And then when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done,
The boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep.
And oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry, and sorry are they and sick:
Yet there's none so cursed with a lime-kiln thirst as that Athabaska Dick.

He was long and slim and lean of limb, but strong as a stripling bear;
And by the right of his skill and might he guided the Long Brigade.
All water-wise were his laughing eyes, and he steered with a careless care,
And he shunned the shock of foam and rock, till they came to the Big Cascade.
And here they must make the long...
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 'Twas in scientific circles 
That the great Professor Brown 
Had a world-wide reputation 
As a writer of renown. 
He had striven finer feelings 
In our natures to implant 
By his Treatise on the Morals 
Of the Red-eyed Bulldog Ant. 
He had hoisted an opponent 
Who had trodden unawares 
On his "Reasons for Bare Patches 
On the Female Native Bears". 
So they gave him an appointment 
As instructor to a band 
Of the most attractive females 
To be gathered in the land. 
'Twas a "Ladies' Science Circle" -- 
Just the latest social fad 
For the Nicest People only, 
And to make their rivals mad. 
They were fond of "science rambles" 
To the country from the town -- 
A parade of female beauty 
In the leadership of Brown. 
They would pick a place for luncheon 
And catch beetles on their rugs; 
The Professor called 'em "optera" -- 
They calld 'em "nasty bugs". 
Well, the thing was bound to perish 
For no lovely woman can 
Feel the slightest interest 
In a club without a Man -- 
The Professor hardly counted 
He was crazy as a loon, 
With a countenance suggestive 
Of an elderly baboon. 
But the breath of Fate blew on it...
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 You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the...
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When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We've braved the belly of the beast
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn't always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
And yes we are far from polished
far from pristine
but that doesn't mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That...
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 Here is a silence I had not hoped for

This side of paradise, I am an old believer

In nature’s bounty as God’s grace

To us poor mortals, fretting and fuming

At frustrated lust or the scent of fame 

Coming too late to make a difference

Blue with white vertebrae of cloud forms

Riming the spectrum of green dark of poplars

Lined like soldiers, paler the hue of hawthorn 

With the heather beginning to bud blue

Before September purple, yellow ragwort

Sways in the wind as distantly a plane hums

And a lazy bee bumbles by.

A day in Brenda’s flat, mostly play with Eydie,

My favourite of her seven cats, they soothe better

Than Diazepan for panic

Seroxat for grief

Zopiclone to make me sleep.

I smoke my pipe and sip blackcurrant tea

Aware of the ticking clock: I have to be back

To talk to my son’s key nurse when she comes on

For the night shift. Always there are things to sort,

Misapprehensions to untangle, delusions to decipher,

Lies to expose, statistics to disclose, Trust Boards

And team meetings to attend, ‘Mental Health Monthly’

To peruse, funds for my press to raise – the only one 

I ever got will leave me out of pocket.

A couple sat on the next bench

Are earnestly discussing child custody, broken marriages,

Failed affairs, social...
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 "I've been where it hurts." the Kid 

He becomes Sierra Kid

 I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Mine, 
 Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. 
 Dark walls of sugar pine --, 
 And where I left the road 

 I left myself behind; 
 Talked to no one, thought 
 Of nothing. When my luck ran out 
 Lived on berries, nuts, bleached grass. 
 Driven by the wind 
 Through great Sonora pass, 

 I found an Indian's teeth; 
 Turned and climbed again 
 Without direction, compass, path, 
 Without a way of coming down, 
 Until I stopped somewhere 
 And gave the place a name. 

 I called the forests mine; 
 Whatever I could hear 
 I took to be a voice: a man 
 Was something I would never hear.

He faces his second winter in the Sierra

 A hard brown bug, maybe a beetle, 
 Packing a ball of sparrow shit -- 
 What shall I call it? 
 Shit beetle? Why's it pushing here 
 At this great height in the thin air 
 With its ridiculous waddle 

 Up the hard side of Hard Luck Hill? 
 And the furred thing that...
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 Rain filled the streets 
once a year, rising almost 
to door and window sills, 
battering walls and roofs 
until it cleaned away the mess 
we'd made. My father told 
me this, he told me it ran 
downtown and spilled into 
the river, which in turn 
emptied finally into the sea. 
He said this only once 
while I sat on the arm 
of his chair and stared out 
at the banks of gray snow 
melting as the March rain 
streaked past. All the rest 
of that day passed on 
into childhood, into nothing, 
or perhaps some portion hung 
on in a tiny corner of thought. 
Perhaps a clot of cinders 
that peppered the front yard 
clung to a spar of old weed 
or the concrete lip of the curb 
and worked its way back under 
the new growth spring brought 
and is a part of that yard 
still. Perhaps light falling 
on distant houses becomes 
those houses, hunching them 
down at dusk like sheep 
browsing on a far hillside, 
or at daybreak gilds 
the roofs until they groan 
under the new weight, or 
after rain lifts haloes 
of steam from the rinsed, 
white aluminum siding, 
and those houses and all...
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 The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began
With someone dying.

 When her mother died,
My mother refused to attend the funeral--
In fact, she sulked in her tent all through the year
Of the old lady's dying. I don't know why:
She said, because she loved her mother so much
She couldn't bear to see the way the doctors,
Or her father, or--someone--was letting her mother die.
"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet."

She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint.
Possibly that's the reason I write these poems.

But they did speak: on the phone. Wept and argued,
So fiercely one or the other often cut off
A sentence by hanging up in rage--like lovers,
But all that year she never saw her face.

They lived on the same block, four doors apart.
"Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace;
With them that walk against me is my sun."

"Synagogue" is a word I never heard,
We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school.
Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east.
"Lay institution": she taught me we...
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 Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy
The sons of God fought in that great emprise?
Why dost thou walk our common earth again?
Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy,
His purple galley and his Tyrian men
And treacherous Aphrodite's mocking eyes?
For surely it was thou, who, like a star
Hung in the silver silence of the night,
Didst lure the Old World's chivalry and might
Into the clamorous crimson waves of war!

Or didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?
In amorous Sidon was thy temple built
Over the light and laughter of the sea
Where, behind lattice scarlet-wrought and gilt,
Some brown-limbed girl did weave thee tapestry,
All through the waste and wearied hours of noon;
Till her wan cheek with flame of passion burned,
And she rose up the sea-washed lips to kiss
Of some glad Cyprian sailor, safe returned
From Calpe and the cliffs of Herakles!

No! thou art Helen, and none other one!
It was for thee that young Sarpedon died,
And Memnon's manhood was untimely spent;
It was for thee gold-crested Hector tried
With Thetis' child that evil race to run,
In the last year of thy beleaguerment;
Ay! even now the glory of thy fame
Burns in those fields of trampled asphodel,
Where the high lords whom Ilion knew so well
Clash ghostly shields, and call upon thy...
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 I.

I said---Then, dearest, since 'tis so,
Since now at length my fate I know,
Since nothing all my love avails,
Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,
Since this was written and needs must be---
My whole heart rises up to bless
Your name in pride and thankfulness!
Take back the hope you gave,---I claim
---Only a memory of the same,
---And this beside, if you will not blame,
Your leave for one more last ride with me.

II.

My mistress bent that brow of hers;
Those deep dark eyes where pride demurs
When pity would be softening through,
Fixed me, a breathing-while or two,
With life or death in the balance: right!
The blood replenished me again;
My last thought was at least not vain:
I and my mistress, side by side
Shall be together, breathe and ride,
So, one day more am I deified.
Who knows but the world may end tonight?

III.

Hush! if you saw some western cloud
All billowy-bosomed, over-bowed
By many benedictions---sun's
And moon's and evening-star's at once---
And so, you, looking and loving best,
Conscious grew, your passion drew
Cloud, sunset, moonrise, star-shine too,
Down on you, near and yet more near,
Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!---
Thus leant she and lingered---joy and fear!
Thus lay she a moment on my breast.

IV.

Then we began to ride. My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped...
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 Pitch here the tent, while the old horse grazes:
By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage.
It's nigh my last above the daisies:
My next leaf'll be man's blank page.
Yes, my old girl! and it's no use crying:
Juggler, constable, king, must bow.
One that outjuggles all's been spying
Long to have me, and he has me now.

We've travelled times to this old common:
Often we've hung our pots in the gorse.
We've had a stirring life, old woman!
You, and I, and the old grey horse.
Races, and fairs, and royal occasions,
Found us coming to their call:
Now they'll miss us at our stations:
There's a Juggler outjuggles all!

Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly!
Over the duck-pond the willow shakes.
Easy to think that grieving's folly,
When the hand's firm as driven stakes!
Ay, when we're strong, and braced, and manful,
Life's a sweet fiddle: but we're a batch
Born to become the Great Juggler's han'ful:
Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch.

Here's where the lads of the village cricket:
I was a lad not wide from here:
Couldn't I whip off the bale from the wicket?
Like an old world those days appear!
Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatch'd ale-house--I know them!
They are old friends of my halts, and seem,
Somehow, as if kind thanks I...
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 In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price's Hotel and Theater.
And here's where boats blew two blasts for the keeper
To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears
Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works
And the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pier
To let them through. In the middle of the summer
Two or three cars might wait for the iron trusswork
Winching aside, with maybe a child to notice
A name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,
Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,
The Idler. If a boat was running whiskey,
The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passed
And opened up again for the Coast Guard cutter
Slowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.
The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,
The river pulling and coursing between the piers.
Never the same phrase twice, the catbird filling
The humid August evening near the inlet
With borrowed music that he melds and changes.
Dragonflies...
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