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Famous Reservation Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Sexton, Anne
...on a three-day drunk,
he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk,

his matched luggage
and pocketed a confirmed reservation,
his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.

I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening thee wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,

the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

He died on the road,
his heart pushed from nec...Read more of this...



by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...
I mean distrait. I don’t know what I mean.
I only know that I am at your service, 
Always, yet with a special reservation 
That you may deem eccentric. All the same 
Unless your living dead man comes to life, 
Or is less indiscriminately dead,
I shall go home.” 

“No, you will not go home,” 
Said Avon; “or I beg that you will not.” 
So saying, he went slowly to the door 
And turned the key. “Forgive me and my manners,
But I would be alone with you th...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...>



III.
The avaricious and encroaching rail
Seized the wide fields which knew the Indians' trail.
Back to the reservations in the West
The native owners of the land were pressed, 
And selfish cities, harbingers of want, 
Shut from their vision each accustomed haunt.
Yet hungry Progress, never satisfied, 
Gazed on the western plains, and gazing, longed and sighed.



IV.
As some strange bullock in a pasture field
Compels the herds to fear him, and to yiel...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...es me pleasure;
For of all that earth e'er lends,

'Tis the sweetest treasure.
Therefore solemnly I swear,

With no reservation,
That maliciously I'll ne'er

Leave my present station.

Now that here we're gather'd round,

Chasing cares and slumbers,
Let, methought, the goblet sound

To the bard's glad numbers!
Many a hundred mile away,

Go those we love dearly;
Therefore let us here to-day

Make the glass ring clearly!

Here's His health, through Whom we live!

I that...Read more of this...

by Carruth, Hayden
...gh.
For a while we close the immense index of images

 which is
Our lives--for instance, the child on the Mescalero reservation

 in New Mexico in 1966
Sitting naked in the dirt outside his family's hut of tin and

 cardboard,
Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course the child is

 here with us now,
We cannot close the index. How will we survive? We don't and

 cannot know.
Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The

 machine
M...Read more of this...



by Sexton, Anne
...must die a little,
have a book of matches go off in your hand,
see your best friend copying your exam,
visit an Indian reservation and see
their plastic feathers,
the dead dream.
One must be a prisoner just once to hear
the lock twist into his gut.
After all that
one is free to grasp at the trees, the stones,
the sky, the birds that make sense out of air.
But even in a telephone booth
evil can seep out of the receiver
and we must cover it with a mattress,
and the...Read more of this...

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