Famous Tank Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tank poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tank poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tank poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
de la Mare, Walter
...to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car can run on its partial tank of gas....Read more of this...
by
Sassoon, Siegfried
...he Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...f you Uncle Arthur
In your greasy overalls,
Home from Hudswell Clarks
In Hunslet, copper-smith
Who helped to build
Tank engines for Ceylon,
Double-headers for the Veldt.
14
From fourteen to fifty-four
You never had a day off sick,
Your trips to Blackpool
Every Banky week were always
Blessed with non-stop sun
And Bamforths’ postcards
Showed you shared the beach
With half of Leeds
15
One day you came home early,
Sat fidgeting before the fire,
Smok...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage -
The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.
And m...Read more of this...
by
Brecht, Bertolt
...self.
IT IS NIGHT
The married couples
Lie in their beds. The young women
Will bear orphans.
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has ...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...nese
looked my straight
in the eye
and asked:
"Those who crush our rice fields
with the caterpillar treads of their tanks
and who swagger through our cities
like emperors of hell,
are they of YOUR race,
the race of him who CREATED you?"
I almost raised my hand
and cried "No!"
27 April
Tonight at the blare of an American trumpet
--the horn of a 12-horsepower Ford--
I awoke from a dream,
and what I glimpsed for an instant
instantly vanished.
What I'd seen was a...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...peel off my clothes
and lay me down in the grass.
Once only my palms showed.
Once I hung around in my woolly tank suit,
drying my hair in those little meatball curls.
Now I am clothed in gold air with
one dozen halos glistening on my skin.
I am a fortunate lady.
I've gotten out of my pouch
and my teeth are glad
and my heart, that witness,
beats well at the thought.
Oh body, be glad.
You are good goods.
*
Middle-class lady,
yo...Read more of this...
by
Amichai, Yehuda
...d, and that's all.
In the ground, warf and woof, lay the dead.
I want to die in My own bed.
Like slits in a tank, their eyes were uncanny,
I'm always the few and they are the many.
I must answer. They can interrogate My head.
But I want to die in My own bed.
The sun stood still in Gibeon. Forever so, it's willing
to illuminate those waging battle and killing.
I may not see My wife when her blood is shed,
But I want to die in My own bed.Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage fo...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...ned a bucket beneath her, hung by a strap around her flank,
Then turned her loose in the timber back of the seven-mile tank.
Go? She went mad! She went tearing and screaming with fear through the trees,
While the curst bucket beneath her was banging her flanks and her knees.
Bucking and racing and screaming she ran to the back of the run,
Killed herself there in a gully; by God, but they paid for their fun!
Paid for it dear, for the black-boys found tracks, and...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...olk rush for the special tram in their childless, senseless haste,
And never a pile of a lock we drive - but a few mean tanks we scratch -
For the fate of a nation is nought compared with the turn of a cricket match!
There's a gutter of mud where there spread a flood from the land-long western creeks,
There is dust and drought on the plains far out where the water lay for weeks,
There's a pitiful dam where a dyke should stretch and a tank where a lake should be,
And the rai...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...of mine and he said, "I'm in the slammer. Come
and get me out. They're burning black candles around the
drunk tank. "
I went down to the Hall of Justice to bail my friend out,
and discovered that 208 is the room number of the bail office,
It was very simple. I paid ten dollars for my friend's life
and found the original meaning of 208, how it runs like melt-
ing snow all the way down the mountainside to a small cat
living and playing in Hotel Trout Fi...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
---Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)
V.
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp---
In three sips the ...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...ull-powered and well-equipped,
To draw as much as he could get, and let the wool be shipped;
And wedged into a "Cargo Tank", full up from stern to bow,
A mighty clip of wool went Home from Rooti-iti-au.
It was the Bold Bank Manager who drew a heavy cheque;
Rerenga cashed it thoughtfully, then clasped him round the neck;
A hug from him was not at all a thing you'd call a lark --
You see he lived on mutton-birds and dried remains of shark --
But still it showed his...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...
And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,
Where flowers are growing wild and rank,
Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.
All birds of evil omen there
Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,
The witless wanderer to snare.
The fatal Notes neglected fall,
No creature heeds the treacherous call,
For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.
The wandering phantom broke and fled,
Straightway I saw within my head
A vision of a ghostly bed,
Where lay two worn decrep...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...nto it thirteen of the crew quickly and cautiously did throng,
With two bags of biscuits and a cask of water out of the tank.
And for these precious mercies, God they did thank;
Who is the giver of all good things,
And to those that put their trust in him often succour brings
And such has been the case with these brave men at sea,
That sent Captain McMullan to save them and bring them to Dundee.
When once into the pinnace they improvised a sail into a tent,
Which ...Read more of this...
by
Darwish, Mahmoud
...s, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank—
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass...
***
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind...Read more of this...
by
Douglas, Keith
...soldier sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.
But she would wee...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...?
Tall and elegant you have grown,
You sang songs, Madeira drank,
To the far-off Anatolia
You have driven your mine tank.
On the Malahov's kurgan
They shot an officer with a gun.
Less than a week for 20 years
He saw God's light with eyes so dear.
Prayer
Give me bitter years in malady
Breathlessness, sleeplessness, fever,
Both a friend and a child and mysterious
Gift take away forever --
Thus I pray after your liturgy
After many exhaustin...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Standard of California derricks offshore.
...Read more of this...
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