Silence Poems

Popular Silence Poems
The Victims
by Sharon Olds

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,

......

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The Man With The Hoe (Written After Seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting)
by Edwin Markham

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

......

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Exposure
by Wilfred Owen

I

1 Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...
2 Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
3 Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
4 Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
5 But nothing happens.

6 Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
7 Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.

......

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The Country Of Marriage
by Wendell Berry

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said

......

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Palme
by Paul Valéry

Veiling, barely, his dread
Beauty and its blaze,
An angel sets warm bread
and cool milk at my place.
His eyelids make the sign
Of prayer; I lower mine,
Words interleaving vision:
--Calm, calm, be ever calm!
Feel the whole weight a palm
Bears upright in profusion.

......

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Recent Silence Poems
Towards the Core of Silence
by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Away from pesky leeches and from
Broken, sad walls,
I strive towards the centre.

Voices are hidden from fallen, spavined horses,
And echoes draped in robes of
Mutiny fly past.

The centre retains the pith of silence.
Heart-murmurs celebrate the only known

......

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Silence
by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Silence faces the contours of a
somnolent east when winds from a
rising slope say their prayers in muffled
voices, through the raucous sounds of
rolling autumnal leaves, painted red and
orange by God’s apprentices here on this
fragile, rambunctious earth that pines away
when silence pulls its cloak up and yawns.

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You!
by Michael R. Burch

These are poems about relationships, with lovers, family members, and a God (real or fictitious?)



You!
by Michael R. Burch

For thirty years You have not spoken to me;
I heard the dull hollow echo of silence
as though strange communion between us.

......

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Sanctuary
by Evelyn Judy Buehler

I was a stylish, assertive travel agent, arranging getaways for busy people;
Like sudden getaways of jewel, shooting stars, on ebony nights of upheaval.

I planned calm, exotic, trip itineraries, for all tired of city hustle and bustle;
Like a dark red flower, blooming isolated, in peach sunshine of little trouble.

I also arranged for transportation and lodging, for exhausted, glad travelers;
As beauty birds fly north and south singing, ever ecstatic, joy ambassadors.

I began dreaming of a getaway myself, one of complete rest and relaxation.

......

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A Drunks Sober Mind
by Johnathon B

People are noisy.
Sitting in the dark I can hear the highway from miles away.
The trucks screaming over the metal bridge that's there for the construction.
The cars on their ways to work.
Honking horns sometimes bullet the air.
I wonder if people ever realize how noisy they are?
I bet there's a guy in Brooklyn that's never truly heard quiet in his life.
Maybe that's why people make movies about nature and what it's like to be outside on adventures.
Or just truly outside, in nature.
Sometimes I think I've never truly heard quiet.

......

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