Famous Reunion Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Idea of Ancestry

by Etheridge Knight
 Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews.They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.I know
their dark eyes, they know mine.I know their style,
they know mine.I am all of them, they are all of...Read more of this...

A Little History

by David Lehman
 Some people find out they are Jews.
They can't believe it.
Thy had always hated Jews.
As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old
 neighborhood, looking for Jews.
They were not Jewish, they were Irish.
They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their
 lips, looking for Jews.
They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.
Sometimes they...Read more of this...

Antichrist or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode

by G K Chesterton
 Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Russian peasants round their pope
Huddled, Smith,
Hear about it all, I hope,
Don't they,...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXXVIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXXVIII. E' mi par d' or in ora udire il messo. HE FEELS THAT THE DAY OF THEIR REUNION IS AT HAND.  Methinks from hour to hour her voice I hear:My Lady calls me! I would fain obey;Within, without, I feel myself decay;And am so alter'd—not with many a year—That...Read more of this...

Christmas Eve

by Anne Sexton
 Oh sharp diamond, my mother! 
I could not count the cost 
of all your faces, your moods-- 
that present that I lost. 
Sweet girl, my deathbed, 
my jewel-fingered lady, 
your portrait flickered all night 
by the bulbs of the tree. 

Your face as calm as the moon 
over a mannered sea, 
presided at the family reunion, 
the twelve grandchildren...Read more of this...

Reunion

by Carolyn Kizer
 For more than thirty years we hadn't met.
I remembered the bright query of your face,
That single-minded look,intense and stern,
Yet most important -how could I forget?-
Was what your taught me inadvertantly
(tutored by books and parents, even more
By my own awe at what was yet to learn):
The finest intellect can be a bore.

At this, perhaps our final interview,
Still luminous with your...Read more of this...

On A March Day

by Sara Teasdale
 Here in the teeth of this triumphant wind 
 That shakes the naked shadows on the ground, 
Making a key-board of the earth to strike 
 From clattering tree and hedge a separate sound, 

Bear witness for me that I loved my life, 
 All things that hurt me and all things that healed, 
And that I swore it...Read more of this...

Etesia Absent

by Henry Vaughan
 Love, the world's life! What a sad death
Thy absence is to lose our breath
At once and die, is but to live
Enlarged, without the scant reprieve
Of pulse and air: whose dull returns
And narrow circles the soul mourns.
But to be dead alive, and still
To wish, but never have our will:
To be possessed, and yet to miss;
To wed a true but absent...Read more of this...

Childhood

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely --and why?

We're still reminded--: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened...Read more of this...

Operation Memory

by David Lehman
 We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.

We'd been drinking since...Read more of this...

Sams Racehorse

by Marriott Edgar
 When Sam Small retired from the Army 
He'd a pension of ninepence a day,
And seven pounds fourteen and twopence 
He'd saved from his rations and pay.

He knew this 'ere wasn't a fortune, 
But reckoned with prudence and care
He'd find some investment to save him 
From hard work and things like that there.

He thought he'd invest in a race orse,...Read more of this...

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