But wait! What makes a short poem short? For my purposes here, there are super short poems (fewer than 10 lines) and short-ish poems (10–15 lines). And because poetry exists beyond the page nowadays, taking on visual or spoken word or both, I have a few examples of those for you to enjoy as well. Obviously, this is not a complete list of all the great poems—let alone all the great short poems—but it’s a fine place for us to start. (And don’t worry. My Waffle House poem isn’t one of them.)
Super short poems (fewer than 10 lines)
Margaret Atwood “You Fit Into Me” Ezra Pound “In a Station of the Metro” Anais Nin “Risk” Edna St. Vincent Millay “First Fig” Emily Dickinson “It’s All I Have to Bring Today” Henry David Thoreau “My life has been the poem I would have writ” William Carlos Williams “Red Wheelbarrow” Stephen Crane “I Stood Upon a High Place” Maya Angelou “Awakening in New York” Sylvia Plath “Metaphors” Robert Frost “The Rose Family” Anne Sexton “The Black Art” Joy Harjo “Invisible Fish” Rita Dove “Happenstance” Lucille Clifton “My Mama moved among the days”
Short-ish poems (10-15 lines)
Danez Smith “The 17 Year-Old & the Gay Bar” Jeanine Gailey “Okay, Ophelia” Natasha Tretheway “Housekeeping” Naomi Shihab Nye “300 Goats” Billy Collins “Introduction to Poetry” Jacqueline Woodson “Church” Mary Oliver “Sleeping in the Forest” Karina Borowicz “September Tomatoes” William Shakespeare “Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds” Chen Chen “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” Jacqueline Woodson “on paper” Pablo Neruda “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII” Maggie Smith “Good Bones” Francisco Aragón “Lunch Break” Robert Frost “Dust of Snow” Ross Gay “A Small Needful Fact” Natasha Tretheway “Miscegenation” Lia Purpura “Resolution” Lucille Clifton “blessing the boats” Nikki Giovanni “BLK History Month” Adrienne Rich “A Mark of Resistance” Langston Hughes “Harlem” Wendell Berry “The Peace of Wild Things”
instagram short poems
rupi kaur
A post shared by rupi kaur (@rupikaur_) on Dec 4, 2017 at 6:00pm PST atticus poetry
A post shared by ATTICUS (@atticuspoetry) on Jan 10, 2018 at 10:26am PST
maybe just read the poems to me? okay.
Lee Mokobe
T. Miller
Hollie McNish
Want more short poems and poetry? Check out “58 Beautiful Love Poems” or our full poetry archives.
