Finding more poetry

Say a puddle, and someone littler to push in it.

They observe with glee the ballistic results

Of ice cream with spoons for catapults, And inform the assembly with tears and glares

Nash, Ogden



...You too, beloved?

Why? What for?

Darling, look -

I came,

I brought flowers,

but, but... I never took

silver spoons from your drawer!

Vladimir Mayakovsky



The man at the table across from mine

is eating yogurt. His eyes, following

he progress of the spoon, cross briefly

each time it nears his face. Time,

and the world with all its principalities,

might come to an end as prophesied

by the Apostle John, but what about

this man, so completely present

to the little carton with its cool,

sweet food, which has caused no animal

to suffer, and which he is eating

with a pearl-white plastic spoon.

Jane Kenyon



Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,

a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons

hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house

on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits

a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding

and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.

Dorianne Laux

The impertinent squalls of one squeezebox vies against another

in ambling pick-ups. The rattle of dice and spoons.

DA Powell

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons

in a broth of wind. Last week

they made a darker sky below the sky.


The houses have swallowed their colors,

and each car moves in the blind sack

of its sound like the slipping of water.


Flowing means falling very slowly—

the river passing under the tracks,

the tracks then buried beneath the road.


When a knocking came in the night,

I rose violently toward my reflection

hovering beneath this world. And then


the fluorescent kitchen in the window

like a page I was reading—a face

coming into focus behind it:


my neighbor locked out of his own party,

looking for a phone. I gave him

a beer and the lit pad of numbers


through which he disappeared; I found

I was alone with the voices that bloomed

as he opened the door. It's time


to slip my body beneath the covers,

let it fall down the increments of shale,

let the wind consume every spoon.


My voice unhinging itself from light,

my voice landing in its cradle—.

How terrifying a payphone is


hanging at the end of its cord.

Which is not to be confused with sleep—

sleep gives the body back its mouth.

Wayne Miller

I was thinking about how I wanted to use the poetry I have collected about spoons, and was thinking about using them to make a catalog of spoons, but instead of it being a shopping catalog showing what all of the different types of spoons look like it would be a catalog showing all of the different meanings a spoon can have. I thought of this as a way to condense my research and all of the literature and meaning I've found about the spoon into one place so it could possibly act as a guide for how to create meaning with combining imagery and word later on