Famous Donald Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Birthday Candle

...Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles on a cake,
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish...Read more of this...
by Justice, Donald


A Poet at Twenty

...Images leap with him from branch to branch. His eyes
brighten, his head cocks, he pauses under a green bough,
alert.
And when I see him I want to hide him somewhere.
The other wood is past the hill. But he will enter it, and find the particular maple. He will walk through the door of the maple, and his arms will pull out of their sockets, and the blood wil...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Affirmation

...To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

An old life

...Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where 
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened 
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
T...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Christmas party at the South Danbury Church

...December twenty-first
we gather at the white Church festooned 
red and green, the tree flashing 
green-red lights beside the altar.
After the children of Sunday School 
recite Scripture, sing songs,
and scrape out solos,
they retire to dress for the finale,
to perform the pageant 
again: Mary and Joseph kneeling 
cradleside, Three Kings,
shepherds and shep...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald


Distressed Haiku

...In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.

I'm coming! Don't move!

Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.

I finished with April
halfway through March.

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

Will Hall ever write
lines that do anythin...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Gathering Song of Donald the Black

...Pibroch of Donuil Dhu 
Pibroch of Donuil 
Wake thy wild voice anew, 
Summon Clan Conuil! 
Come away, come away, 
Hark to the summons! 
Come in your war-array, 
Gentles and commons. 

Come from deep glen, and 
From mountain so rocky; 
The war-pipe and pennon 
Are at Inverlocky. 
Come every hill-plaid, and 
True heart that wears one, 
Come every steel blade,...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter

Men At Forty

...Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm...Read more of this...
by Justice, Donald

Messy Room

...d Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!...Read more of this...
by Silverstein, Shel

Name of Horses

...All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding 
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul 
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, 
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, 
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

...Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrat...Read more of this...
by Justice, Donald

Sestina: Here In Katmandu

...We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,

As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.

It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of s...Read more of this...
by Justice, Donald

Shake The Superflux!

...der
valuable, would they? Who are they, anyway? I'd answer that
with speculations based on newspaper accounts if I were
Donald E. Westlake, whose novels I'm hooked on, but
this first cigarette after twenty-four hours
of abstinence tastes so good it makes me want
to include it in my catalogue of pleasures
designed to hide the ugliness or sweep it away
the way the violent overflow of rain over cliffs
cleans the sewers and drains of Ithaca
whose waterfalls head my list, followed...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

Sudden Things

...A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, full of children and old people. The lion was loose. Either because of the wind, or by malevolent human energy, which is the same thing, the cage had come open. Suppose a chi...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

The Alligator Bride

...The clock of my days winds down.
The cat eats sparrows outside my window.
Once, she brought me a small rabbit
which we devoured together, under
the Empire Table
while the men shrieked
repossessing the gold umbrella.

Now the beard on my clock turns white.
My cat stares into dark corners
missing her gold umbrella.
She is in love
with the Alligator Bride.

A...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

The White Cliffs

...led Percy, dear.' 
'But I hate the name Percy. I like Richard or Ronald, 
Or Peter like your brother, or Ian or Noel or Donald—' 
'But the eldest is always called Percy, dear.' 
So the Vicar christened him Percy; and Lady Jean 
Gave to the child and me the empty place 
In hr heart. Poor Lady, it was as if she had seen
The world destroyed— the extinction of her race,
Her country, her class, her name— and now she saw
Them live again. And I would hear her say:
'No. I admire Amer...Read more of this...
by Miller, Alice Duer

Villanelle

...Katie could put her feet behind her head
Or do a grand plié, position two,
Her suppleness magnificent in bed.

I strained my lower back, and Katie bled,
Only a little, doing what we could do
When Katie tucked her feet behind her head.

Her torso was a C-cup'd figurehead,
Wearing below its navel a tattoo
That writhed in suppleness upon the bed.

As love led...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Villanelle At Sundown

...Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

Or are Americans half in love with failure?
One used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.
(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow--

remember?) Or does mere distance lend a value
to th...Read more of this...
by Justice, Donald

White Apples

...when my father had been dead a week
I woke with his voice in my ear 
I sat up in bed

and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

Wolf Knife

...In the mid August, in the second year
of my First Polar Expedition, the snow and ice of winter
almost upon us, Kantiuk and I
attempted to dash the sledge
along Crispin Bay, searching again for relics
of the Frankline Expedition. Now a storm blew,
and we turned back, and we struggled slowly
in snow, lest we depart land and venture onto ice
from which a sudd...Read more of this...
by Hall, Donald

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