Famous Planes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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For A Thirteenth Birthday

by Lisel Mueller
 You have read War and Peace.
Now here is Sister Carrie,
not up to Tolstoy; still
it will second the real world:
predictable planes and levels,
pavement that holds you,
stairs that lift you,
ice that trips you,
nights that begin after sunset,
four lunar phases,
a finite house.

I give you Dreiser
although (or because)
I am no longer sure.
Lately I have been walking into glass doors.
Through the car windows, curbs...Read more of this...

The Old Tin Hat

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 In the good old days when the Army's ways were simple and unrefined, 
With a stock to keep their chins in front, and a pigtail down behind, 
When the only light in the barracks at night was a candle of grease or fat, 
When they put the extinguisher on the light, they called it the Old Tin Hat. 
Now,...Read more of this...

Misgivings

by William Matthews
 "Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city 
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away 
by floods. And worse than what we can't 
control is what...Read more of this...

Autobiography

by Nazim Hikmet
 I was born in 1902
I never once went back to my birthplace
I don't like to turn back
at three I served as a pasha's grandson in Aleppo
at nineteen as a student at Moscow Communist University
at forty-nine I was back in Moscow as the Tcheka Party's guest
and I've been a poet since I was fourteen
some people know all about plants some...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

The Inventory Of Goodbye

by Anne Sexton
 I have a pack of letters,
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides -- what a bargain -- no expensive...Read more of this...

Losses

by Randall Jarrell
 It was not dying: everybody died. 
It was not dying: we had died before 
In the routine crashes-- and our fields 
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks, 
And the rates rose, all because of us. 
We died on the wrong page of the almanac, 
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away; 
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a...Read more of this...

Le Manteau De Pascal

by Jorie Graham
 I have put on my great coat it is cold.

It is an outer garment.

Coarse, woolen.

Of unknown origin.

 *

It has a fine inner lining but it is 
as an exterior that you see it — a grace.

 *

I have a coat I am wearing. It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions
has made, skillfully,...Read more of this...

Under Siege

by Mahmoud Darwish
 Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time 
Close to the gardens of broken shadows, 
We do what prisoners do, 
And what the jobless do: 
We cultivate hope. 

*** 
A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent 
For we closely watch the hour of victory: 
No night in our night lit up...Read more of this...

The Four Brothers

by Carl Sandburg
 MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,
 Going along,
 Going along,
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad—
The boys and men in...Read more of this...

Parlez-Vous Francais?

by Delmore Schwartz
 Caesar, the amplifier voice, announces
Crime and reparation. In the barber shop
Recumbent men attend, while absently
The barber doffs the naked face with cream.
Caesar proposes, Caesar promises
Pride, justice, and the sun
Brilliant and strong on everyone,
Speeding one hundred miles an hour across the land:
Caesar declares the will. The barber firmly
Planes the stubble with a steady hand,
While all in barber chairs reclining,
In wet...Read more of this...

The Eye

by Robinson Jeffers
 The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of...Read more of this...

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

by Adrienne Rich
 The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge.
The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child.
You're the only one I've told.
I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
Otto has a calm, complacent way
of following me with his eyes,...Read more of this...

Thoughts: Mahomed Akram

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   If some day this body of mine were burned
   (It found no favour alas! with you)
   And the ashes scattered abroad, unurned,
   Would Love die also, would Thought die too?
       But who can answer, or who can trust,
       No...Read more of this...

Understand Old One

by Oodgeroo Noonuccal
 What if you came back now 
To our new world, the city roaring 
There on the old peaceful camping place 
Of your red fires along the quiet water, 
How you would wonder 
At towering stone gunyas high in air 
Immense, incredible; 
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars 
Like things frantic in flight....Read more of this...

Realisation

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Hers was a lonely, shadowed lot; 
Or so the unperceiving thought, 
Who looked no deeper than her face, 
Devoid of chiselled lines of grace –
No farther than her humble grate, 
And wondered how she bore her fate.

Yet she was neither lone nor sad; 
So much of love her spirit had, 
She found an ever-flowing spring
Of happiness in everything.

So near...Read more of this...

For My Father, Karachi 1947

by Meena Alexander
Mid-May, centipedes looped over netting at the well's mouth.
Girls grew frisky in summer frocks, lilies spotted with blood.

You were bound to meteorology,
Science of fickle clouds, ferocious winds.

The day you turned twenty-six fighter planes cut a storm,
Fissured air baring the heart's intricate meshwork

Of want and need—
Springs of cirrus out of which sap and shoot you raised me.

Crossing Chand Bibi Road,
Named after...Read more of this...

Old and New

by Dejan Stojanovic
If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago 
He would've thought they were birds 
Or angels from another world 
Or messengers from other planets. 

Every new machine would have surprised him— 
The car, TV, radio, phone, camera. 
He would've thought he was a savage 
Who didn't understand. 

If he saw a computer, 
Watching people talking on the internet,...Read more of this...

Reading Moby-Dick at 30000 Feet

by Tony Hoagland
 At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey

I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage

from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,

a little bored,...Read more of this...

South Country

by Kenneth Slessor
 After the whey-faced anonymity 
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, 
After the rubbing and the hit of brush, 
You come to the South Country 
As if the argument of trees were done, 
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, 
All ended by these clear and gliding planes 
Like an abrupt solution. 

And over the flat earth of empty...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 10: Letter

by Conrad Aiken
 From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.

It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and...Read more of this...

Who Runs America?

by Allen Ginsberg
Oil brown smog over Denver 
Oil red dung colored smoke 
level to level across the horizon 

blue tainted sky above 
Oil car smog gasoline 
hazing red Denver's day 

December bare trees 

sticking up from housetop streets 

Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over 

radar wheels, black smoke 

drifts from tailfins 

Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains 
Oil from Texas,...Read more of this...

from crossing the line

by Rg Gregory
 (1) a great man

there was a great man
so great he couldn't be criticised in the light
who died
and for a whole week people turned up their collars over their ears
and wept with great gossiping

houses wore their roofs at a mournful angle
and television announcers carried their eyes around in long drooping bags
there was a hush upon the voice of the land
as...Read more of this...

The Lovers of the Poor

by Gwendolyn Brooks
 arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. 
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their...Read more of this...

A Story For Rose On The Midnight Flight To Boston

by Anne Sexton
 Until tonight they were separate specialties, 
different stories, the best of their own worst. 
Riding my warm cabin home, I remember Betsy's 
laughter; she laughed as you did, Rose, at the first 
story. Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone 
going somewhere and we plotted it in the humdrum 
school for proper girls. The next April the plane 
bucked...Read more of this...

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