Famous Trucks Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Winter Daybreak Above Vence

by James Wright
 The night's drifts
Pile up below me and behind my back,
Slide down the hill, rise again, and build
Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house.
In the valley below me,
Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,
The road lamps glow.
They are so cold, they might as well be dark.
Trucks and cars
Cough and drone down there between the golden
Coffins of greenhouses,...Read more of this...

The Red Dance

by Anne Sexton
 There was a girl
who danced in the city that night,
that April 22nd,
all along the Charles River.
It was as if one hundred men were watching
or do I mean the one hundred eyes of God?
The yellow patches in the sycamores
glowed like miniature flashlights.
The shadows, the skin of them
were ice cubes that flashed
from the red dress to the roof.
Mile by mile along...Read more of this...

In The Naked Bed In Platos Cave

by Delmore Schwartz
 In the naked bed, in Plato's cave, 
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
 Hearing the milkman's clop,
his striving up the stair, the bottle's chink,
I rose from bed, lit a...Read more of this...

September On Jessore Road

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...

At Corfu

by Norman Dubie
 In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan
visited us twice, finally
dying of headaches in the south harbor.

Ever since, visitors have come to the island.
They bring their dogs and children.

The ferry boat with a red cross
freshly painted on it
lifts in uneven drafts of smoke and steam
devising the mustard horizon
that is grotesque with purple thunderheads.

In the rising winds the angry sea birds
circle...Read more of this...

The Last Meeting

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I

Because the night was falling warm and still 
Upon a golden day at April’s end, 
I thought; I will go up the hill once more 
To find the face of him that I have lost, 
And speak with him before his ghost has flown
Far from the earth that might not keep him long. 

So down the road I went,...Read more of this...

Cartoon Physics Part 1

by Nick Flynn
 Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick...Read more of this...

Mayakovsky In New York: A Found Poem

by Annie Dillard
 New York: You take a train that rips through versts.
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.

For many hours the train flies along the banks
of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,
passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,
and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Bridges leap over the train...Read more of this...

Holy Day

by Philip Levine
 Los Angeles hums
a little tune --
trucks down
the coast road
for Monday Market
packed with small faces
blinking in the dark.
My mother dreams
by the open window.
On the drainboard
the gray roast humps
untouched, the oven
bangs its iron jaws,
but it's over.
Before her on the table
set for so many
her glass of fire
goes out.
The childish photographs,
the letters and cards
scatter at last.
The dead burn alone
toward dawn....Read more of this...

Clean Curtains

by Carl Sandburg
 NEW neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets.

The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun’s bonnet.

One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard cartons.

The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels whirled dust—there...Read more of this...

Green Fields

by W S Merwin
 By this part of the century few are left who believe
 in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
 are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
 and there are pets for the children but the...Read more of this...

The Unknowable

by Philip Levine
 Los Angeles hums
a little tune --
trucks down
the coast road
for Monday Market
packed with small faces
blinking in the dark.
My mother dreams
by the open window.
On the drainboard
the gray roast humps
untouched, the oven
bangs its iron jaws,
but it's over.
Before her on the table
set for so many
her glass of fire
goes out.
The childish photographs,
the letters and cards
scatter at last.
The dead burn alone
toward dawn....Read more of this...

The Fury Of Cocks

by Anne Sexton
 There they are 
drooping over the breakfast plates, 
angel-like, 
folding in their sad wing, 
animal sad, 
and only the night before 
there they were 
playing the banjo. 
Once more the day's light comes 
with its immense sun, 
its mother trucks, 
its engines of amputation. 
Whereas last night 
the cock knew its way home, 
as stiff as a hammer, 
battering...Read more of this...

The Butter Factory

by Les Murray
 It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.

The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...

House Of Silence

by Philip Levine
 The winter sun, golden and tired, 
settles on the irregular army 
of bottles. Outside the trucks 
jostle toward the open road, 
outside it's Saturday afternoon, 
and young women in black pass by 
arm in arm. This bar 
is the house of silence, and we drink 
to silence without raising our voices 
in the old way. We drink to doors...Read more of this...

A Ballad of Ducks

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The railway rattled and roared and swung 
With jolting and bumping trucks. 
The sun, like a billiard red ball, hung 
In the Western sky: and the tireless tongue 
Of the wild-eyed man in the corner told 
This terrible tale of the days of old, 
And the party that ought to have kept the ducks. 
"Well, it ain't all joy...Read more of this...

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