Famous Nebraska Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Nebraska poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous nebraska poems. These examples illustrate what a famous nebraska poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Sandburg, Carl
...e chiseling of arms and shoulders, the ivory of a laugh, the bells of song.
Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...l to ourselves, and in ourselves;
We stand self-pois’d in the middle, branching thence over the world;
From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.
Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or sinful in ourselves only.
(O mother! O sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy’d us;
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)
3
Have you thought there could ...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.
Cowboy rags and ****** rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white d...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...g, brooding black velvet, relapsing to the voiceless … battering Russian marches on a piano … drive of blizzards across Nebraska.
Yes, riding horseback on hills by the sea … sitting at the ivory keys in black velvet, a rope of pearls on white shoulders....Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...rose a sound of dread, such as startles the sleeping encampments
Far in the western prairies or forests that skirt the Nebraska,
When the wild horses affrighted sweep by with the speed of the whirlwind,
Or the loud bellowing herds of buffaloes rush to the river.
Such was the sound that arose on the night, as the herds and the horses
Broke through their folds and fences, and madly rushed o'er the meadows.
Overwhelmed with the sight, yet speechless, the priest and the...Read more of this...
by
Belieu, Erin
...Omaha, Nebraska They do not sleep nights
but stand between
rows of glowing corn and
cabbages grown on acres past
the edge of the city.
Surrendered flags,
their nightgowns furl and
unfurl around their legs.
Only women could be this
white. Like mules,
they are sterile
and it appears that
their mouths are always
open. Because they are thin
as we...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...—and shanties hang by an eyelash to
the hill slants back around Omaha.
A span of steel ties up the kin of Iowa and
Nebraska across the yellow, big-hoofed Missouri River.
Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,
Eats and swears from a dirty face.
Omaha works to get the world a breakfast....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...d the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!
9
From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d;
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O
pioneers!
10
O resistless, restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult—I am rapt with love for all,...Read more of this...
by
Simic, Charles
...f
In an open truck.
They were still naked, travelling
On their sofa
Over a darkening plain,
Some unknown Kansas or Nebraska
With a storm brewing.
The woman opening a red umbrella
In the truck. The boy
And the dog running after them,
As if after a rooster
With its head chopped off....Read more of this...
by
Graham, Jorie
...I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will
and helplessness, as the...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.
The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska....Read more of this...
by
Montejo, Eugenio
...snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board;
it didn’t stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that’s miraculous
was only an Adagio written long ago
in the Symposium’s score....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...and swarming
places,
Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the rest, are to be,
Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and the rest;
(Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska;)
Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for—and of what all sights,
North,
South, East and West, are;
Of This Union, soak’d, welded in blood—of the solemn price paid—of the
unnamed
lost, ever present in my mind;
—Of the temporary use of ...Read more of this...
by
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
...Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
ans bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscraper...Read more of this...
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