Famous Oxygen Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Oxygen poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous oxygen poems. These examples illustrate what a famous oxygen poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ave used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is ...Read more of this...
by
Rich, Adrienne
...came from—the chlorine and the salt are blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.
Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...mber.
The kettle is whistling.
I must butter the toast.
And give it jam too.
My kitchen is a heart.
I must feed it oxygen once in a while
and mother the mother.
*
Say the woman is forty-four.
Say she is five seven-and-a-half.
Say her hair is stick color.
Say her eyes are chameleon.
Would you put her in a sack and bury her,
suck her down into the dumb dirt?
Some would.
If not, time will.
Ms. Dog, how much time you got left?
Ms. Dog, when you gonna feel that ...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...y bend
Held of those Brass arms --
Best Giant made --
If your Soul seesaw --
Lift the Flesh door --
The Poltroon wants Oxygen --
Nothing more --...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...
and I did not cry,
and I did not beg,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
Do you like me?
How absurd!
What's a question like that?
What's a silence like that?
And what am I hanging around for,
riddled with what his silence said?...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...nd I become
a wish to assimilate the world, including
you, if possible through the skin
like a cool plant's tricks with oxygen
and live by a harmless green burning.
I would not consume
you or ever
finish, you would still be there
surrounding me, complete
as the air.
Unfortunately I don't have leaves.
Instead I have eyes
and teeth and other non-green
things which rule out osmosis.
So be careful, I mean it,
I give you fair warning:
This kind of hunger draws
everything into ...Read more of this...
by
Atwood, Margaret
...has gone
Beyond the wind-shaped stones on the high wall.
His breath in that final coma came steady.
Stertorous, the oxygen mask, the catheter,
The telephone call summons and night train,
The taxi over the moors, the charge nurse
With little to say but kind words.
I had a father once, the records say,
Who carried me on the cross-bar of his bike
Down Knostrop: we saw the white bells
Of bindweed crawling with ants
Strangle the rusty railings.
My father, a quiet ma...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...y simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty --
Till I take vaster attitudes --
And strut upon my stem --
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them --
My Splendors, are Menagerie --
But their Completeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass --
Whom none but Beetles -- know....Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...gine came and parked
in the shadow of the big poplar tree
of Fourth Street one night
keeping its engine running
pumping oxygen to the old woman
in the basement
when she died the red lights went on burning...Read more of this...
by
Merwin, W S
...t preceded it
Struck no one but myself --
But I would not exchange the Bolt
For all the rest of Life --
Indebtedness to Oxygen
The Happy may repay,
But not the obligation
To Electricity --
It founds the Homes and decks the Days
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying Light --
The Thought is quiet as a Flake --
A Crash without a Sound,
How Life's reverberation
Its Explanation found --...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, ...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Woul...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...
The mechanisms for
the prevention of breathing multiply,
the windpipe squeezed just enough
for several molecules of oxygen
to enter.
There is no fatwa in this land,
what are you thinking, this is Europe.
A sovereign union
of the poor and the tycoons,
no more borders, but also no
decency or dignity.
There is no fatwa in this land,
but when you die, we will
cash in your death as well,
sell it five times over
to raise its value.
After death we will make y...Read more of this...
by
Kramberger, Taja
...what children will result?
There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,
Good in themselves, but evil toward each other:
He oxygen, she hydrogen,
Their son, a devastating fire.
I Trainor, the druggist, a mixer of chemicals,
Killed while making an experiment,
Lived unwedded....Read more of this...
by
Masters, Edgar Lee
...e eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I hve no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The wall...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
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