Famous Night Sky Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Night Sky poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous night sky poems. These examples illustrate what a famous night sky poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Jabberers

by Carl Sandburg
 I RISE out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

Two tongues from the depths,
Alike only as a yellow cat and a green parrot are alike,
Fling their staccato tantalizations
Into a wildcat jabber
Over a gossamer web of unanswerables.

The second and the third silence,
Even the hundredth silence,
Is better than no silence at all
(Maybe this is...Read more of this...

Testimony Regarding a Ghost

by Carl Sandburg
 THE ROSES slanted crimson sobs
On the night sky hair of the women,
And the long light-fingered men
Spoke to the dark-haired women,
“Nothing lovelier, nothing lovelier.”
How could he sit there among us all
Guzzling blood into his guts,
Goblets, mugs, buckets—
Leaning, toppling, laughing
With a slobber on his mouth,
A smear of red on his strong raw lips,
How could he sit there
And only two or three...Read more of this...

Listening

by D. H. Lawrence
 I listen to the stillness of you,
My dear, among it all; 
I feel your silence touch my words as I talk,
And take them in thrall. 

My words fly off a forge
The length of a spark; 
I see the night-sky easily sip them 
Up in the dark. 

The lark sings loud and glad, 
Yet I am not loth
That silence should...Read more of this...

Alix

by Carl Sandburg
 THE MARE Alix breaks the world’s trotting record one day. I see her heels flash down the dust of an Illinois race track on a summer afternoon. I see the timekeepers put their heads together over stopwatches, and call to the grand stand a split second is clipped off the old world’s record and a new world’s record fixed.

I...Read more of this...

Brass Keys

by Carl Sandburg
 JOY … weaving two violet petals for a coat lapel … painting on a slab of night sky a Christ face … slipping new brass keys into rusty iron locks and shouldering till at last the door gives and we are in a new room … forever and ever violet petals, slabs, the Christ face, brass keys and new...Read more of this...

Planetarium

by Adrienne Rich
 Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), 
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the...Read more of this...

Drunk

by D. H. Lawrence
 Too far away, oh love, I know, 
To save me from this haunted road, 
Whose lofty roses break and blow 
On a night-sky bent with a load 

Of lights: each solitary rose, 
Each arc-lamp golden does expose 
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows 
Night blenched with a thousand snows. 

Of hawthorn and of lilac trees, 
White lilac; shows...Read more of this...

Baltic Fog Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 (Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a circle...Read more of this...

Eternity

by James Lee Jobe
  for C. G. Macdonald, 1956-2006


Charlie, sunrise is a three-legged mongrel dog,

going deaf, already blind in one eye,

answering to the unlikely name, 'Lucky.'


The sky, at gray-blue dawn, is a football field painted 

by smiling artists. Each artist has 3 arms, 3 hands, 3 legs.

One leg drags behind, leaving a trail, leaving a mark.


The future resembles a cloudy dream 

where...Read more of this...

Afterlife Light

by Dejan Stojanovic
That star in the night sky 
Is not there anymore
But we see it and will see it
For millions of years yet to come.
Did the star die? 
Did it live? 
In life, we call this phenomenon
A ghost, a hallucination.
(Is life a ghost too?) 
What if the star never lived? 
Or maybe its death dies
While the star continues to live, 
Cheating death
With...Read more of this...

Fire Dreams

by Carl Sandburg
 I REMEMBER here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Pilgrims of iron jaws,
Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,
And the random chapters say
They were glad and sang to God.

And so
Since the iron-jawed men sat down
And said, “Thanks, O God,”
For life and soup and a little less
Than a hobo handout to-day,
Since gray...Read more of this...

Bridge Over The Aire Book 6

by Barry Tebb
 THE WALK TO THE PARADISE GARDENS



1



Bonfire Night beckoned us to the bridge

By Saint Hilda’s where we started down

Knostrop to chump but I trailed behind

With Margaret when it was late September

The song of summer ceased and fires in

Blackleaded grates began and we were

Hidden from the others by the bridge’s span.

2



When you bent I saw the buds of your breasts

As you...Read more of this...

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