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.

......

Mandalay

by Rudyard Kipling

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

......

The Nightingale

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Conversation Poem, April, 1798

No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge!
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring: it flows silently.
O'er its soft bed of verdure. All is still.
A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,

......

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.

......

Lot's Wife

by Wislawa Szymborska

They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.

......

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.

......