Famous Negroes Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Negroes poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous negroes poems. These examples illustrate what a famous negroes poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...y the wind;
The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark—the supper-fires, and the cooking and
eating
by
whites and *******,
Thirty or forty great wagons—the mules, cattle, horses, feeding from troughs,
The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees—the
flames—with
the
black smoke from the pitch-pine, curling and rising;
Southern fishermen fishing—the sounds and inlets of North Carolina’s
coast—the
shad-fishery and the herring-fishery—the large...Read more of this...
by
Wright, James
...In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of ******* in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...fter marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze ******* breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...e, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead *******, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
III
I sometimes ...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.
With John Brown at Harper's Ferry, ******* died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song m...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on *******, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotro...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor,
and
upon
*******, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent....Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...spite of pride,
For like assistance, far and wide,
Till all this formidable league rose
Of Indians, British troops and *******?
And can you break these triple bands
By all your workmanship of hands?
"Sir," quoth Honorius, "we presume
You guess from past feats what's to come,
And from the mighty deeds of Gage
Foretell how fierce the war he'll wage.
You doubtless recollected here
The annals of his first great year:
While, wearying out the Tories' patience,
He spent his b...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...or trophies spread the ruin'd plains!
What females, caught in evil hour,
By force submit to British power;
Or plunder'd ******* in disaster
Confess King George their lord and master!
What crimson corses strew their way,
What smoaking carnage dims the day!
Along the shore, for sure reduction,
They wield the besom of destruction.
Great Homer likens, in his Ilias,
To dogstar bright the fierce Achilles;
But ne'er beheld in red procession
Three dogstars rise in constellation,
...Read more of this...
by
Hayden, Robert
...th her:
"That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames
spreading from starboard already were beyond
control, the ******* howling and their chains
entangled with the flames:
"That the burning blacks could not be reached,
that the Crew abandoned ship,
leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:
"Further Deponent sayeth not."
Pilot Oh Pilot Me
II
Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Po...Read more of this...
by
Wheatley, Phillis
...ought now knew,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
'Their colour is a diabolic die.'
Remember, Christians, *******, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train....Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...h, gone to his rest.
Parson or Presbyter, Pharisee, Sadducee,
What did you do for him? -- bad was the best.
******* and foreigners, all have a claim on you;
Yearly you send your well-advertised hoard,
But the poor jockey-boy -- shame on you, shame on you,
"Feed ye My little ones" -- what said the Lord?
Him ye held less than the outer barbarian,
Left him to die in his ignorant sin;
Have you no principles, humanitarian?
Have you no precept -- "Go gather them...Read more of this...
by
Southey, Robert
...m, not one suffering groan
Beneath the twisted thong, he weeps alone
In bitterness; thinking that far away
Tho' the gay ******* join the midnight song,
Tho' merriment resounds on Niger's shore,
She whom he loves far from the chearful throng
Stands sad, and gazes from her lowly door
With dim grown eye, silent and woe-begone,
And weeps for him who will return no more....Read more of this...
by
Cocteau, Jean
...
deep poetry
The mirror-paneled wardrobe
washing down ice-floes
the little eskimo girl
dreaming
in a heap
of moist *******
her nose was
flattened
against the window-pane
of dreary Christmases
A white bear
adorned with chromatic moire
dries himself in the midnight sun
Liners
The huge luxury item
Slowly founders
all its lights aglow
and so
sinks the evening-dress ball
into the thousand mirrors
of the palace hotel
And now
it is I
the thin Columbus of phenomena
al...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ongs;
I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems;
I hear the Virginia plantation-chorus of *******, of a harvest night, in the glare of
pine-knots;
I hear the strong baritone of the ’long-shore-men of Mannahatta;
I hear the stevedores unlading the cargoes, and singing;
I hear the screams of the water-fowl of solitary north-west lakes;
I hear the rustling pattering of locusts, as they strike the grain and grass with the
showers
of
their ter...Read more of this...
by
Scannell, Vernon
...ered heads of kings
Rot by the misty Thames; the roses of York
And Lancaster are pressed between the leaves
Of history; ******* sleep in Africa.
The complexities of simple interest lurk
In inkwells and the brittle sticks of chalk:
Afternoon is come and English Grammar.
Rain falls as though the sky has been bereaved,
Stutters its inarticulate grief on glass
Of every lachrymose pane. The children read
Their books or make pretence of concentration,
Each bowed head s...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...less hand,
For the mark of the cursed broad arrow was deep in the heart of the land.
They treated us worse than the ******* were treated in slavery's day -
And justice was not for the diggers, as shown by the Bently affray.
"P'r'aps Bently was wrong. If he wasn't the bloodthirsty villain they said,
He was one of the jackals that gather where the carcass of labour is laid.
'Twas b'lieved that he murdered a digger, and they let him off scot-free as well,
And th...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...t its edges, innocently excluded
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,
the tenants, the good ******* down in the village,
their mouth in the locked jaw of a silent scream.
A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly
all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds,
more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle
in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished;
a scorching wind of a scream
that began to extinguish the fireflies,...Read more of this...
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