BANANA POEMS

Running Amok

In the slums of Tondo, people dwell
in shacks of cardboard, bits of bamboo,
corrugated metal, and a few cement blocks.

.....

Nick Carbo

A Valentine (ii)

Go, Cupid, and my sweetheart tell
I love her well.
Yes, though she tramples on my heart
And rends that bleeding thing apart;
.....

Eugene Field

We Learned

The decorum of fire...
-- Pablo Neruda

We learned the decorum of fire,
.....

Erica Jong

Autumn Landscape

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves.
Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene:

the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees,
.....

Ho Xuan Huong

Golu

ONCE I had a little sweetheart
In the land of the Malay,â??
Such a little yellow sweetheart!
Warm and peerless as the day
.....

John Boyle O'reilly

My Lady Of Whims

(A medieval Spanish legend slanderously setting forth the utter unreason of woman.)
ROMAQUIA sat and wept her
Lace mantilla full of tears.
King Abit laid by his scepter,
.....

Katharine Lee Bates

The Home

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was
hiding its last gold like a miser.
The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the
widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.
.....

Rabindranath Tagore

Sword Blades And Poppy Seed

A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
.....

Amy Lowell

The Moral

You mustn't groom an Arab with a file.
You hadn't ought to tension-spring a mule.
You couldn't push a brumby fifty mile
And drop him in a boiler-shed to cool.
.....

Rudyard Kipling

At The Grave Of Walker

He lies low in the levelled sand,
Unsheltered from the tropic sun,
And now of all he knew not one
Will speak him fair in that far land.
.....

Joaquin Miller

The Alley

Because you are four years old
the candle is all dressed up in a new frill.
And stars nod to you through the hole in the curtain,
(except the big stiff planets
.....

Lola Ridge

The Bough Of Nonsense: An Idyll

Back from the Somme two Fusiliers
Limped painfully home; the elder said,
S. “Robert, I've lived three thousand years
This Summer, and I'm nine parts dead.”
.....

Robert Graves

Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
.....

Sylvia Plath

The Bough Of Nonsense

AN IDYLL


Back from the Somme two Fusiliers
.....

Robert Graves

Song Of The Wise Children

When the darkened Fifties dip to the North,
And frost and the fog divide the air,
And the day is dead at his breaking-forth,
Sirs, it is bitter beneath the Bear!
.....

Rudyard Kipling

Bojangles And Jo

Stairstep music: ups,
downs, Bill Robinson smiling,
jazzdancing the rounds.

.....

James A. Emanuel

The Banana Tree

The banana tree
blown by winds pours raindrops
into the bucket

.....

Matsuo Basho

The Legend Of Kintu.

When earth was young and men were few,
And all things freshly born and new
Seemed made for blessing, not for ban,
Kintu, the god, appeared as man.
.....

Susan Coolidge (sarah Chauncey Woolsey)

The Moral

You mustn't groom an Arab with a file.
You hadn't ought to tension-spring a mule.
You couldn't push a brumby fifty mile
And drop him in a boiler-shed to cool.
.....

Anonymous English

Sphincter

I hope my good old asshole holds out
60 years it's been mostly OK
Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation
survived the altiplano hospital--
.....

Allen Ginsberg

An Infinite Number Of Monkeys

After all the Shakespeare, the book
of poems they type is the saddest
in history.

.....

Ronald Koertge

Impossible To Tell

to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
.....

Robert Pinsky

Seasonal Cycle - Chapter 03 - Pre Autumn

"On the departure of rainy season bechanced is autumn with a heart-pleasingly bloomed lotus as her face, betokening the heart-pleasing face of a new bride, and the autumnal fields of white grass with whitish flowers as her apparel, which betoken the whitish bridal apparel of a new bride, and the amorously clucking clucks of swans that have just returned from Lake Maanasa as rains have gone, are the jingling anklets of autumn, which betoken the delightful jingles of anklets of new bride, and now the rice is ready to ripe and thus the tenuous stalks of rice, which have their necks a little bent down, betoken the obeisant face of a new docile bride...

"Blanched is the earth with whitish grass and the nights with silvery and coolant moonbeams of the moon, and the rivers with white swans, lakes with white-lotuses, and that forest up to its fringes with whitish jasmine flowers and with somewhat whitish seven-leaved banana plants that are swagging under the weight of their flowers...

.....

Kalidasa

Old-fashioned Requited Love

I HAVE ransacked the encyclopedias
And slid my fingers among topics and titles
Looking for you.

.....

Carl Sandburg

Shipwrecked's Island

An orphan of shipwreck
I'm in a gardenless land,
without laboured soil,
one island that a volcano laid waste
.....

Clark Ashton Smith

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea: Book The Fourth.

Stand on the gleaming Pharos,[1] and aloud
Shout, Commerce, to the kingdoms of the earth;
Shout, for thy golden portals are set wide,
And all thy streamers o'er the surge, aloft,
.....

William Lisle Bowles

Karlene (ii)

Good-morning, Karlene. It's a very
Fine beautiful world we are in.
Well, you do look as ripe as a berry;
And, pardon me, such a real chin!
.....

Bliss Carman And Richard Hovey

The United Fruit Co.

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parcelled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
.....

Pablo Neruda

Bleezer's Ice Cream

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before,
.....

Jack Prelutsky

New Chum And Old Monarch

â??Chieftain, enter my verandah;
Sit not in the blinding glare;
Thou shalt have a refuge, and a
Remnant of my household fare.
.....

James Brunton Stephens

The True-blue American

Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American,
For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must
Think about everything; because thatâ??s all there is to think about,
Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy,
.....

Delmore Schwartz

The Island: Canto Iv.

I.
White as a white sail on a dusky sea,
When half the horizon 's clouded and half free,
Fluttering between the dun wave and the sky,
.....

George Gordon Byron

Giant Fungus

40-acre growth found in Michigan.
â?? The Los Angeles Times


.....

Charles Harper Webb

Kiwi

Fruit without a stone, its shiny
pulp is clear green. Inside, tiny
black microdot seeds. Skin
the color of khakiImagine
.....

May Swenson

The Banana's Lullaby

When grandma wished to keep her fruit
Her apples she would take
And put them on a bed of straw
At rest, but wide awake;
.....

Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis

The Spirit Of Discovery By Sea - Book The Fourth

Stand on the gleaming Pharos, and aloud
Shout, Commerce, to the kingdoms of the earth;
Shout, for thy golden portals are set wide,
And all thy streamers o'er the surge, aloft,
.....

William Lisle Bowles

Sun-up

(Shadows over a cradleâ?¦
fire-light craningâ?¦.
A hand
throws something in the fire
.....

Lola Ridge

The Town Dump

<i>â??The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious.�</i>

A mile out in the marshes, under a sky
.....

Howard Nemerov

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

.....

Allen Ginsberg

Conversation With Jeanne

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
.....

Czeslaw Milosz

My Still Bank

When I was a little girl
I have a tube coin bank
An enclosed bamboo segment
With a slit at the side
.....

Rose Marie Juan Austin

Walking Down Park

walking down park
amsterdam
or columbus do you ever stop
to think what it looked like
.....

Nikki Giovanni

The Tin Bank.

Speaking of banks, I'm bound to say
That a bank of tin is far the best,
And I know of one that has stood for years
In a pleasant home away out west.
.....

Eugene Field

Tomakewaw, - A Parody

"Give me of your fruit, banana!
Of your yellow fruit, banana!
Growing on the tropic islands,
Fertile islands in the ocean;
.....

W. M. Mackeracher

Banana Island

If i remember the night at banana island
i cant hold back the smiling
sitting in the heat of the commercial bus
looking out into the third mainland ocean
.....

Adebayo Sir Toby

So Be It.

We played, dined and wined together but today you want to bring me down
Forgetting so quick how you comfortably ate from my pepper and salts
With smile and joy, you licked my oily palms but to my messy hands you bring insults
Certainly, in the anger of Oya, Oshun, Olokun and Yemoja you will surely drown.
.....

Fatoki, Oluwatobi O.

The Snow Spirit

No, ne'er did the wave in its element steep
An island of lovelier charms;
It blooms in the giant embrace of the deep,
Like Hebe in Hercules' arms.
.....

Thomas Moore

Udaan

Daudhne mai ab maza nahi,dil ab parindo ki tarah udaan bharna chahta hai.
Rukne ka ab man nahi,dil ab toofano mai saer karna chahta hai.
Aasan to kuch bhi nahi magar,dil ab naamumkin ko apna dost banana chahta hai.
Todh do inn bediyo ko,dil aaj ek uchi udhan bharna chahta hai.
.....

Neha Agrawal

The Island - Canto The Fourth

I.

White as a white sail on a dusky sea,
When half the horizon's clouded and half free,
.....

George Gordon Byron

A Song For Two

I have lacquered my teeth to find a husband.

And I have need of a wife.
Give me a kiss and they will marry us
.....

Edward Powys Mathers (as Translator)