Famous Skinny Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Skinny poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous skinny poems. These examples illustrate what a famous skinny poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Allen Ginsberg
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts
Noplace to **** but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad
Millions of daughters walk...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THESE are the most singular of all the Poems
of Goethe, and to many will appear so wild and fantastic, as to
leave anything but a pleasing impression. Those at the beginning,
addressed to his friend Behrisch, were written at the age of eighteen,
and most of the remainder were composed while he was still quite
young. Despite, however,...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
I Aria
"--Kiss me there where pride is glittering
Kiss me where I am ripened and round fruit
Kiss me wherever, however, I am supple, bare and flare
(Let the bell be rung as long as I am young:
let ring and fly like a great bronze wing!)
"--I'll kiss you wherever you think you are poor,
Wherever you shudder, feeling striped or barred,...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;
Lots...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither.
Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
The sun brightens tardily
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.
he fen sickens.
Frost drops even the spider. Clearly
The genius of plenitude
Houses himself elsewhwere. Our folk thin
Lamentably....Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
She is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.
She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs
When food is going.
Oh yes, she can make haste when...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
The first purple wisteria
I recall from boyhood hung
on a wire outside the windows
of the breakfast room next door
at the home of Steve Pisaris.
I loved his tall, skinny daughter,
or so I thought, and I would wait
beside the back door, prostrate,
begging to be taken in. Perhaps
it was only the flowers of spring...Read more of this...
by
Edward Taylor
The disorganization to which I currently belong
has skipped several meetings in a row
which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive.
Down at headquarters there's a secretary
and a janitor who I shall call Suzie
and boy can she ever shoot straight.
She'll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her to.
I mow the grass every other Saturday
and that's the day...Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
That one small boy with a face like pallid cheese
And burnt-out little eyes could make a blaze
As brazen, fierce and huge, as red and gold
And zany yellow as the one that spoiled
Three thousand guineas' worth of property
And crops at Godwin's Farm on Saturday
Is frightening---as fact and metaphor:
An ordinary match intended for
The...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Fat lady, in your four-wheeled chair,
Dolled up to beat the band,
At me you arrogantly stare
With gold lorgnette in hand.
Oh how you differ from the dame
So shabby, gaunt and grey,
With legs rheumatically lame,
Who steers you on your way.
Nay, jewelled lady, look not back
Lest you should be disturbed
To see the skinny hag in black
Who boosts...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
The murderer's little daughter
who is barely ten years old
jerks her shoulders
right and left
so as to catch a glimpse of me
without turning round.
Her skinny little arms
wrap themselves
this way then that
reversely about her body!
Nervously
she crushes her straw hat
about her eyes
and tilts her head
to deepen the shadow—
smiling excitedly!...Read more of this...
by
Lisa Zaran
Born woman. Go on.
It's farther than it seems,
but okay.
Credit card's been stolen.
Go on.
Above all, remember,
whenever you cry,
husbands roll their eyes,
and children worry.
Go on.
The father that was yours
gets killed by a lung disease.
He loved you, at least you think so.
Go on.
Drink, smoke, do drugs.
Go on....Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.
I can see you as a great goose egg
or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.
You swell like a natural...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
for Sylvia Plath
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
You know what it is to be born alone,
Baby tortoise!
The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell,
Not yet awake,
And remain lapsed on earth,
Not quite alive.
A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open,
Like some iron door;
To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your...Read more of this...
by
Edward Field
The poster with my picture on it
Is hanging on the bulletin board in the Post Office.
I stand by it hoping to be recognized
Posing first full face and then profile
But everybody passes by and I have to admit
The photograph was taken some years ago.
I was unwanted then and I'm unwanted now
Ah guess ah'll go up echo mountain and crah.
I wish...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
Making his advances
He does not look at her, nor sniff at her,
No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank.
Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin
That work beneath her while she sprawls along
In her ungainly pace,
Her folds of skin that work and row
Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.
And so he strains beneath her housey wall,
And...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
and the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.
Twilights broaden away from our feet too
as rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog's paws, trotting, rotate...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Son," said my mother,
When I was knee-high,
"you've need of clothes to cover you,
and not a rag have I.
"There's nothing in the house
To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with,
Nor thread to take stitches.
"There's nothing in the house
But a loaf-end of rye,
And a harp with a woman's head
Nobody will buy,"
And she began to cry.
That was in the...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Two men I saw reel from a bar
And stumble down the street;
Coarse and uncouth as workmen are,
They walked with wobbly feet.
I watched them, thinking sadly as
I heard their hobnails clink,
The only joy a toiler has
Is to get drowned in drink.
A kitten on a wall,
A skinny, starving stray;
It looked so pitifully small,
A fluff of silver grey.
One of the men came...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Vincent Benet
Gods, what a black, fierce day! The clouds were iron,
Wrenched to strange, rugged shapes; the red sun winked
Over the rough crest of the hairy wood
In angry scorn; the grey road twisted, kinked,
Like a sick serpent, seeming to environ
The trees with magic. All the wood was still --
Cracked, crannied pines bent like malicious cripples...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my...Read more of this...
by
Nazim Hikmet
1
I carved your name on my watchband
with my fingernail.
Where I am, you know,
I don't have a pearl-handled jackknife
(they won't give me anything sharp)
or a plane tree with its head in the clouds.
Trees may grow in the yard,
but I'm not allowed
to see the sky overhead...
How many others are in this place?
I don't know.
I'm alone far from them,
they're all...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
We've got the cholerer in camp -- it's worse than forty fights;
We're dyin' in the wilderness the same as Isrulites;
It's before us, an' be'ind us, an' we cannot get away,
An' the doctor's just reported we've ten more to-day!
Oh, strike your camp an' go, the Bugle's callin',
The Rains are fallin' --
The dead are bushed an' stoned to...Read more of this...
by
Amanda Gorman
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We've braved the belly of the beast
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn't always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't...Read more of this...
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