Famous Scrawny Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Right to Grief

by Carl Sandburg
 To Certain Poets About to Die

TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
scratch off
And get cashed.

Very well,
You for your grief and I for mine.
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to.

I shall cry...Read more of this...

Examination at the Womb-Door

by Ted Hughes
 Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony...Read more of this...

Alphonso Of Castile

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 I Alphonso live and learn,
Seeing nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind,
Lemons run to leaves and rind,
Meagre crop of figs and limes,
Shorter days and harder times.
Flowering April cools and dies
In the insufficient skies;
Imps at high Midsummer blot
Half the sun's disk with a spot;
'Twill not now avail to tan
Orange cheek, or skin of man:
Roses bleach, the goats are dry,
Lisbon quakes, the...Read more of this...

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind. 
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind. 

The sun was rising at six, 
No longer a battered panache above snow... 
It would have been outside. 

It was not from the vast ventriloquism 
Of...Read more of this...

Romance Moderne

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 Tracks of rain and light linger in
the spongy greens of a nature whose 
flickering mountain—bulging nearer, 
ebbing back into the sun 
hollowing itself away to hold a lake,— 
or brown stream rising and falling at the roadside, turning about, 
churning itself white, drawing 
green in over it,—plunging glassy funnels 
fall— 
And—the other world— 
the windshield a blunt barrier: 
Talk...Read more of this...

There Were Dry Red Days

by Sharmagne Leland-St John
 by Sharmagne Leland-St.John

There were dry red days
Devoid of clouds
Devoid of breeze
Sound bruised
My burning bones
Dirt cracked my hands
And caked my cheeks
No buds on limbs of trees
No birds on branches
No hope of rain
Scrawny chickens
Kicked up dust
Scratching for food 
That wasn't there
In the stifling, stillness
Of the scorched night
We dreamt
Of cool oases
Tropical isles
Emerald bays
Not these dry red days...Read more of this...

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