Silence Poems | Poemist

Popular Silence Poems

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.

......

Duino Elegies: The First Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.

......

The Old Pond

by Matsuo Basho

Following are several translations
of the 'Old Pond' poem, which may be
the most famous of all haiku:

Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

- Basho

......

Three Years She Grew In Sun And Shower,

by William Wordsworth

Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.

"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain

......

Tithonus

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

......

Recent Silence Poems

Listening To Silence

by RW Stauter

Looking out the window
I didn't see a sound
Nothing out there moving
The world on solid ground

No birds were out there singing
No rustling of the leaves
Was the river flowing
But silent as a breeze?

......

Where love learns no more

by Ghairo Daniels

WHERE LOVE LEARNS NO MORE

Where Love learns no more
two serpents crawling twine
one midnight black another
luminous wizardy white
entangled fanged bedazzled
circled by ultra violet rays
ultra red Sun the One

......

Without a voice

by Kaylee Wilson

All the words
that never left my mouth
creep through my veins
filling the hollows of my mind
and my lungs with stone
encasing the very essence of me
in lead

weighing me down
as the murky depths

......

sounds of day: prelude

by Rikske Kessner

Today has yet to break its silence, at dawn
the first rays sparkle off dew or frost or snow
followed by a rooster’s crow and we know
Yesterday rescinds its front row seat for another

"The stars are deaf tonight."

by Dylan Wu Rong

I hear the silence in the way they blink,
the ignorance raining on me,
its ridiculous- I am ridiculous.
it is the answer granted to me.
Every time I glance upon myself on the window,
even the clown of the circus laughs,
bowing down to me- in pity or respect or tease,
I shall take it, I’m desperate, so what?
Should I stop or let it flow,
I fear even the night breeze hides from me.

......