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Famous Terminal Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides
To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned
And flickered to its terminal.--Now in an older hand
I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar,
I speak to silences of altered rooms,
Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return....Read more of this...
by Kees, Weldon



...those who would 
turn to her, their faces running 
with tears, and ask her forgiveness.

THE WAR

The Michigan Central Terminal 
the day after victory. Her brother 
home from Europe after years 
of her mother's terror, and he still 
so young but now with the dark 
shadow of a beard, holding her 
tightly among all the others 
calling for their wives or girls. 
That night in the front room 
crowded with family and neighbors -- 
he was first back on the block -- 
he sat cross-l...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...ul rebellious linen, a freighter going down-river two blocks away, outward bound, the green wolf-eyes of the Harborside Terminal glittering on the Jersey shore,
and a train somewhere under ground bringing you towards me to our new living-place from which we can see a river and its traffic (the Hudson and the hidden river, who can say which it is we see, we see something of both. Or who can say the crippled broom-vendor yesterday, who passed
just as we needed a new broom, was ...Read more of this...
by Levertov, Denise
...,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
To the terminal blue of the main.

Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yours...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal 
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky 
 waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart 
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in 
 the night-time red downtown heaven 
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering 
 these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty 
 of our lives, irritable baggage clerks, 
nor the mi...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen



...Over the terminal,
 the arms and chest
 of the god

brightened by snow.
 Formerly mercury,
 formerly silver,

surface yellowed
 by atmospheric sulphurs
 acid exhalations,

and now the shining
 thing's descendant.
 Obscure passages,

dim apertures:
 these clouded windows
 show a few faces

or some empty car's
 filmstrip of lit flames
 --remember them

from school,
 ho...Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark
...ger in its eyes and feel 

In the irregular motions of its tail 
A need that I could feel. He slips his knife 
Into the terminal where we entrain 
And something seems to issue from my life. 

V 

In the mice-sawed potato fields dusk waits. 
My dull ones march by fours on the playground, 
Kicking up dust; The column hesitates 
As though in answer to the rising wind, 

To darkness and the coldness it must enter. 
Listen, my heroes, my half frozen men, 
The corporal calls us to ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...orld.

Young sea horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old,

nobody has ever 
seen this marine 
freak blink.

It radiates on
terminal vertebra 
a comb of twenty

upright spines 
and curls 
its rocky tail.

Saltflush lobster
bull encrusted swims

backwards from the rock.



From The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi. Copyright © 1986 by Callman Rawley....Read more of this...
by Rakosi, Carl

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things