Famous Shirt Poems by Famous Poets

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...e:
no craftsmen have made
 mahogany chairs for my house.
In all conscience,
 I need nothing
except
 a freshly laundered shirt.
When I appear 
 before the CCC
 of the coming
 bright years,
by way of my Bolshevik party card,
 I’ll raise
above the heads
 of a gang of self-seeking
 poets and rogues,
all the hundred volumes
 of my 
 communist-committed books.


Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor....Read more of this...

by Mayakovsky, Vladimir

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...ought from far-ways, adornments laden there—
I’ve never heard of a ship equipped more fit
with war-weapons and battle-shirts,
with swords and with sarks. Many treasures
lay in his lap, which were supposed
to float far away with him into the flood’s keeping. (ll. 32-42)

No lesser gifts did they furnish him,
than the wealth of their people, more than what they gave him,
when they sent him forth at the start,
alone over the waves, while still a baby. (ll. 43-46)

Ne...Read more of this...

by Anonymous,

---

...u stood over

The basket

We struggled

Back with.



Your eyes reflected

The image of me at ten

In my tomato-red tee-shirt

Looking at you in your

Washed-out flower-patterned

Frock.





55



Margaret, Leeds is bound with fog

This Friday in late March, in search

Of you I went to Kirkstall where the

Monks once paced a passage underground

To the nunnery and in the museum

I walked the cobbled streets of memory.





56



They will place you in a sedan chair

Wearing ...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry

---

...thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt. 
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt. 

Then, while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip, 
defiance flashed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip. 

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air, 
and Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there. 

Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped -- 
"That ain't my style," said Casey....Read more of this...

by Thayer, Ernest Lawrence

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...re by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
 We only live, only suspire
 Consumed by either fire or fire.


V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word ne...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

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...f eyes.
He works as a weaver days
and studies nights.
Now it's a long time since the night
came on like a pack of black-shirted Fascists.
The cry of a man out of work
who jumped into the Seine
rose from the dark water.
And ah! you on whose fist-size head
 mountain-like winds descend,
at this very minute you're probably busy
building towers of thick, leather-bound books
to get answers to the questions you asked of the stars.
READ
SI-YA-U
 READ...
And when your eyes find in the...Read more of this...

by Hikmet, Nazim

---

...forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches....Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy

---

...emand his own, 
Pain of displeasure of great Clarendon. 

The state affairs thus marshalled, for the rest 
Monck in his shirt against the Dutch is pressed. 
Often, dear Painter, have I sat and mused 
Why he should still be 'n all adventures used, 
If they for nothing ill, like ashen wood, 
Or think him, like Herb John for nothing good; 
Whether his valour they so much admire, 
Or that for cowardice they all retire, 
As heaven in storms, they call in gusts of state 
On Monck a...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew

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...ghtingale
in the new leaves,
with its silence --
not its silence but its silences,
he says of it:
"It clothes me with a shirt of fire."
"He dares not clap his hands
to make it go on
lest it should fly off;
if he does nothing, it will sleep;
if he cries out, it will not understand."
Unnerved by the nightingale
and dazzled by the apple,
impelled by "the illusion of a fire
effectual to extinguish fire,"
compared with which
the shining of the earth
is but deformity -- a fire
"as ...Read more of this...

by Moore, Marianne

---

...his houses
not so much because they are a ****-threat
but because they are
dirty and
ignorant. dirty? I look down at my shirt
with the beerstain on the front.
ignorant? I light a 6 cent cigar and
forget about
it.

he or they or somebody was supposed to meet me at
the
train station.

of course, they weren't
there. "We'll be there to meet the great
Poet!"

well, I looked around and didn't see any
great poet. besides it was 7 a.m. and
40 degrees. those things
happen. the trouble...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles

---

...yway we waved.
No shoes. No angry doors.
We folded clothes and went
our separate ways.
You left behind that flannel shirt
of yours I liked but remembered to take
your toothbrush. Where are you tonight?

Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again
and old ghosts come back home.
I’m sitting by the Christmas tree
wondering where did we go wrong.

Okay, we didn’t work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I ...Read more of this...

by Cisneros, Sandra

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...some colored rocks to play

with. She liked him and climbed up onto his lap and she start-

ed putting the rocks in his shirt pocket.

 We talked about Great Falls, Montana. I told Trout Fish-

ing in America about a winter I spent as a child in GreatFalls.

"It was during the war and I saw a Deanna Durbin movie seven

times, "I said.

 The baby put a blue rock in Trout Fishing in America's

shirt pocket and he said, "I've been to Great Falls many

times. I remember Indians a...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard

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...ed to her feet. Then straight away She 
peered down stream among the budding sallows.
A youth in leather breeches and a shirt Of finest broidered 
lawn lay out upon
An overhanging bole and deftly swayed A 
well-hooked fish which shone
In the pale lemon sunshine like a spurt
Of silver, bowed and damascened, and girt
With crimson spots and moons which waned and 
played.

VIII
The fish hung circled for a moment, ringed And 
bright; then flung itself out, a thin blade
Of spotted ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy

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...waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.

Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper...Read more of this...

by Hacker, Marilyn

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...ransparent summer morning; 
How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my
 bare-stript heart, 
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.


Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the
 argument of the earth; 
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, 
And I know that the spirit of God is the ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt

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...th silver, and he wore his own brown hair
Tied, but unpowdered. His whole bearing graced
A fine cloth coat, and ruffled shirt, and chased
Sword-hilt. Charlotta looked, but her position
Was hardly easy. When would his volition
Suggest his walking on? And then that 
tune!
A half-a-dozen bars from `Orfeo'
Gone over and over, and murdered. What Fortune
Had brought him there to stare about him so?
"Ach, Gott im Himmel! Why will he not go!"
Thought Lotta, but the young man whistled...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy

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...e National Costume. 

Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals. 

Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself. 

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less. 

To be or to become
i...Read more of this...

by Murray, Les

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..., 
I was so weary and so sore 
I don't think I'd a stood much more. 
Bill in his corner bathed his thumb, 
Buttoned his shirt and glowered glum. 
"I'll never shake your hand" he said. 
"I'd rather see my children dead. 
I've been about had some fun with you, 
But you're a liar and I've done with you. 
You've knocked me out, you didn't beat me; 
Look out the next time that you meet me, 
There'll be no friend to watch the clock for you 
And no convenient thumb to crock for you,...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John

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...he size of a leech.
I gave it to her 
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops 
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surpr...Read more of this...

by Ondaatje, Michael

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...rkes sayn endured*
Whoso that *holds him paid of* his povert', *is satisfied with*
I hold him rich though he hath not a shirt.
He that coveteth is a poore wight
For he would have what is not in his might
But he that nought hath, nor coveteth to have,
Is rich, although ye hold him but a knave.* *slave, abject wretch
*Very povert' is sinne,* properly. *the only true poverty is sin*
Juvenal saith of povert' merrily:
The poore man, when he goes by the way
Before the thieves he ma...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey

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