Famous Rubble Poems by Famous Poets

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

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All The Things You Are Not Yet

...gs you are not yet.
You are words without paper, pages
sighing in summer forests, gardens
where builders stub out their rubble 
and plastic oozes its sweat.
All the things you are, you are not yet.

Not yet the lonely window in midwinter
with the whine of tea on an empty stomach,
not yet the heating you can't afford and must wait for,
tamping a coin in on each hour.
Not the gorgeous shush of restaurant doors
and their interiors, always so much smaller.
Not the smell of the ne...Read more of this...
by Dunmore, Helen


Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

...She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And set...Read more of this...
by Hughes, Ted

Child of Europe

...ason.
The passionless cannot change history.

6
Love no country: countries soon disappear
Love no city: cities are soon rubble.

Throw away keepsakes, or from your desk
A choking, poisonous fume will exude.

Do not love people: people soon perish.
Or they are wronged and call for your help.

Do not gaze into the pools of the past.
Their corroded surface will mirror
A face different from the one you expected.

7
He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise t...Read more of this...
by Milosz, Czeslaw

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

...l finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood -
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Naught in...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Colloquy in Black Rock

...l death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Stephen the martyre was broken down to blood:
Our ransom is the rubble of his death.

Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud
Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart,
Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen's choir
I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud
Flies from his hunching wings and beak--my heart,
he blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.
...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert


Crossing Nation

...eball--

Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese 
 dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed
 State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields
 to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's 
 blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands' 
 brown wasteland scratched by tires

 Jerry Rubin arrested! Beaten, jailed,
 coccyx broken--
Leary out of action--"a public menace...
 persons of tender years...immature
 judgement...pyschiatric examination..."
i.e. Shut up or Else Loonybin or Slam
...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Grey Evening

...es in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields 
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields. 

Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung, 
And little stars come rolling from their husk. 

And all the earth is gone into a dust 
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, 
Covered with ...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

Home

...ryday life more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child's body in pieces - for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.

i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.

no one leaves home ...Read more of this...
by Shire, Warsan

Journey Into The Interior

...nd the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The up...Read more of this...
by Roethke, Theodore

Morning News

...ips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen
sink and a cupboard, on the other was
a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.

Glass is shattered across the photographs;
two half-circles of hardened pocket bread
sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was
shelter, a plastic truck under the branches
of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen,
merely dicing garlic...Read more of this...
by Hacker, Marilyn

Never To Dream Of Spiders

...of strangers
my days collapse into a hollow tube 
soon implodes against now
like an iron wall
my eyes are blocked with rubble 
a smear of perspectives
blurring each horizon 
in the breathless precision of silence
One word is made.

Once the renegade flesh was gone
fall air lay against my face 
sharp and blue as a needle
but the rain fell through October
and death lay a condemnation
within my blood.

The smell of your neck in August
a fine gold wire bejeweling war
all the res...Read more of this...
by Lorde, Audre

November 6

...n "Braves Scalp Giants!"
on the back page
of the Daily News
I pictured the Russians
burying us under a mound
of all the rubble
that rubles could buy
when what he meant was
he had come not to praise Caesar
but to bury him...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

Portent

...bling roses round the door;
It was so peaceful and so still
I sighed . . . and then it was no more.
A flash of flame, a rubble heap;
I cried aloud with woe and fear . . .
And wok myself from troubled sleep -
My home was safe, war was not near.

Oh, I am old, my step is frail,
My carcase bears a score of scars,
And as I climbed my homeward trail
Sadly I thought of other wars.
And when that agave leaf I saw
With vicious knife I made a blear
Of words clean-cut into the raw:
"Cou...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

So Many Blood-Lakes

...which concerned us, we were 
slipped in. We have levelled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble and 
dependence. We have won two wars and a third is comming.

This one--will not be so easy. We were at ease while the powers of the 
world were split into factions: we've changed that.
We have enjoyed fine dreams; we have dreamed of unifying the world; we 
are unifying it--against us.

Two wars, and they breed a third. Now gaurd the beaches, watch t...Read more of this...
by Jeffers, Robinson

The Christmas Tree

...of the alley cold,
Lay the Christmas tree that hadn't been sold;
By a shopman dourly thrown outside;
With the ruck and rubble of Christmas-tide;
Trodden deep in the muck and mire,
Unworthy even to feed a fire...
So I stopped and salvaged that tarnished tree,
And thus is the story it told to me:

"My Mother was Queen of the forest glade,
And proudly I prospered in her shade;
For she said to me: 'When I am dead,
You will be monarch in my stead,
And reign, as I, for a hundred y...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Far Field

...eet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken. 

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Amon...Read more of this...
by Roethke, Theodore

The Frog

...Comes to mind as another small 
        upheaval
amongst the rubble.
His eye matches exactly the bubble
in my spirit-level.
I set aside hammer and chisel
and take him on the trowel.

The entire population of Ireland
springs from a pair left to stand
overnight in a pond
in the gardens of Trinity College,
two bottle of wine left there to chill
after the Act of Union.

There is, surely, in this story
a moral. A moral for...Read more of this...
by Muldoon, Paul

The Last Meeting

...quick-shattering war 
Leapt upon France and called her men to fight. 
Lightly along the terraces I trod, 
Crunching the rubble till I found the door 
That gaped in twilight, framing inward gloom. 
An owl flew out from under the high eaves 
To vanish secretly among the firs,
Where lofty boughs netted the gleam of stars. 
I stumbled in; the dusty floors were strewn 
With cumbering piles of planks and props and beams; 
Tall windows gapped the walls; the place was free 
To every ...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried

Under Siege

...will take different directions: 
I, beyond nature, which in turn 
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock. 

*** 
On my rubble the shadow grows green, 
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat 
He dreams as I do, as the angel does 
That life is here...not over there. 

*** 
In the state of siege, time becomes space 
Transfixed in its eternity 
In the state of siege, space becomes time 
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow. 

*** 
The martyr encircles me every t...Read more of this...
by Darwish, Mahmoud

Weary Will

...beneath the wires 
Through which the dingoes enter. 

And when to block the hole they strain 
With logs and stones and rubble, 
Bill Wombat digs it out again 
Without the slightest trouble. 

The boundary rider bows to fate, 
Admits he's made a blunder 
And rigs a little swinging gate 
To let Bill Wombat under. 

So most contentedly he goes 
Between his haunt and burrow: 
He does the only thing he knows, 
And does it very thorough....Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

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