Famous Trigger Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Trigger poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous trigger poems. These examples illustrate what a famous trigger poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...yours,
Unskaithed by hunger’d Highland boors;
Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,
Wi’ dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,
May twin auld Scotland o’ a life
She likes—as butchers like a knife.
Faith you and Applecross were right
To keep the Highland hounds in sight:
I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,
Than let them ance out owre the water,
Then up among thae lakes and seas,
They’ll mak what rules and laws they please:
Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin,
May set t...Read more of this...
by
Burns, Robert
...Samson’s dead!”
When at his heart he felt the dagger,
He reel’d his wonted bottle-swagger,
But yet he drew the mortal trigger,
Wi’ weel-aimed heed;
“L—d, five!” he cry’d, an’ owre did stagger—
Tam Samson’s dead!
Ilk hoary hunter mourn’d a brither;
Ilk sportsman youth bemoan’d a father;
Yon auld gray stane, amang the heather,
Marks out his head;
Whare Burns has wrote, in rhyming blether,
“Tam Samson’s dead!”
There, low he lies, in lasting rest;
Perhaps upon his mould...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.
The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty.
And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.
Forefingers and thumbs will point absently and casually toward it.
It will be spoken among half-forgotten, wished-to-be-forgotten things.
They will tell the spider: Go on, you’re doing good work....Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.
III
All all and all the dry worlds couple,
G...Read more of this...
by
Atwood, Margaret
...ls behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...Bear witness of those chanting choirs that burk and shirk and snigger,
No man laid hand upon the knife or finger to the trigger!
Cleared in the face of all mankind beneath the winking skies,
Like ph]oenixes from Ph]oenix Park (and what lay there) they rise!
Go shout it to the emerald seas -- give word to Erin now,
Her honourable gentlemen are cleared -- and this is how: --
They only paid the Moonlighter his cattle-hocking price,
They only helped the murderer with counsel's ...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...tent.
Fate is above me, a ditch is beneath.
Up in the sky my soul, like a hound,
howls, despaired,
the trigger to pull it was keen.
Fate has come over my family background,
and on the earth where fate is my kin.
What have I done, apart from the simple
poems I've written in passing to date?
I've been a lightening conductor for people.
Now I have broken my back. Such is fate.
© Copyright Alec Vagapov's translation...Read more of this...
by
Iqbal, Allama Muhammad
...One day a Spider was telling a Fly
'Everyday on this route you are passing by'
But not for once did my fortune trigger
That, towards my home you never got nearer
It matters not if from strangers you abstain
But away from friends you shouldn't remain
My home if you come
That shall be my honor!
That ladder in the front
Will reach you to your friend
When heard the fly the talk of the Spider-friend
(It said) O Sire! Play this game on the ignorant
This f...Read more of this...
by
Evans, Mari
...r Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard
I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...kind
of friendly look as if to say, "When my mother was young she
sang like Deanna Durbin. "
The man pulled the trigger.
He had no sense of humor.
There's always a single feature, a double feature and an
eternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville,
Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.
GRIDER CREEK
I had heard there was some good fishing in there and it was
running clear while all the other large creeks were runn...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...psules
up on Salt Creek and he told me that they were a kind of pis-
tol. They put a pleasing coyote scent on the trigger (prob-
ably the smell of a coyote snatch) and then a coyote comes
along and gives it a good sniff, a fast feel and BLAM! That's
all, brother.
I went fishing up on Salt Creek and caught a nice little
Dolly Varden trout, spotted and slender as a snake you'd ex-
pect to find in a jewelry store, but after a while I could think
only of the gas...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...Mexico,
Where nuclear reactors creat a new Thing under the
Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death
stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon
secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Moun-
tain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millenia
while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with
your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with morta...Read more of this...
by
Benet, Stephen Vincent
...in,
Filled with the ecstasy of being dead. . . .
I put the shining pistol to my head
And pulled the trigger hard -- I felt no pain,
No pain at all; the pistol had missed fire
I thought; then, looking at the floor, I saw
My huddled body lying there -- and awe
Swept over me. I trembled -- and looked up.
About me was -- not that, my heart's desire,
That small and dark abode of death and peace --
But all from which I sought a vain release!
The ...Read more of this...
by
Troupe, Quincy
...ice sheets sweep this slick mirrored dark place
space as keys that turn in tight, trigger
pain of situations
where we move ever so slowly
so gently into time — traced agony
the bright turning of imagination
so slowly
grooved through revolving doors, opening up to enter
mountains where spirits walk voices, ever so slowly
swept by cold, breathing fire
as these elliptical moments of illusion
link fragile loves sunk deep in snows as footprint...Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...oulders
hold themselves tight
in gelatin.
I am unable to daydream.
The sky is a gun aimed at me.
I pull the trigger.
The skull of my promises
leans in a black closet, gapes
with its good mouth
for a teat to suck.
A bird flies back and forth
in my house that is covered by gelatin
and the cat leaps at it
missing. Under the Empire Table
the Alligator Bride
lies in her bridal shroud.
My left hand
leaks on the Chinese carpet....Read more of this...
by
Noyes, Alfred
...e years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for rest!
Up, she stood to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's r...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...bs that are glittering white;
Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair,
Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer;
Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam,
Writing a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home;
Lost like a louse in the burning . . . or else in the tented town
Seeking a drunkard's solace, sinking and sinking down;
Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world,
Lost 'mid the h...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...in the waiting silences the rudder whined beneath,
And each man drew his watchful breath slow taken 'tween the teeth --
Trigger and ear and eye acock, knit brow and hard-drawn lips --
Bracing his feet by chock and cleat for the rolling of the ships.
Till they heard the cough of a wounded man that fought in the fog for breath,
Till they heard the torment of Reuben Paine that wailed upon his death:
"The tides they'll go through Fundy Race but I'll go nevermore
And see the ...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...ing from his flight.
There was a charge in the musket -- pricked and primed was the pan --
My finger crooked on the trigger -- when he reared up like a man.
"Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer,
Making his supplication rose Adam-zad the Bear!
I looked at the swaying shoulders, at the paunch's swag and swing,
And my heart was touched with pity for the monstrous, pleading thing.
"Touched witth pity and wonder, I did not fire then . . .Read more of this...
by
Murray, Les
...ith wire feet
and swoop rings round it.
Magpies, listening askance
for their food in and under lawn,
strut so hair-trigger they almost
dangle on earth, out of the air.
Nearly anything can make their
tailcoats break into wings....Read more of this...
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