Poems with Imagery
Imagery refers to language that appeals to the five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch — creating vivid mental pictures in the reader's mind.
Great poetry doesn't tell you what to feel — it shows you, and lets you feel it yourself. Imagery is the vehicle for this showing. When a poet describes 'the cold bite of November air on bare skin' or 'the amber glow of streetlights on wet pavement,' they're engaging your senses directly, pulling you into the poem's world. The most effective imagery is specific and concrete — not 'a beautiful flower' but 'a bruised peony, its petals curling brown at the edges.' This specificity is what transforms poetry from description into experience.
Examples of Imagery
- 1The fog comes on little cat feet (Carl Sandburg — visual and tactile imagery)
- 2I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore (Yeats — auditory imagery)
- 3The warm smell of bread rising through the kitchen (olfactory imagery)
Poems Using Imagery
The Second Shelf
FeaturedThere's a word for the way your coffee cup still sits on the second shelf where no one else would put it—
First Morning
FeaturedI woke before you and did nothing about it. The radiator ticked. Your shoulder rose and fell.
What the Body Remembers
My hands still set the table for two. Not every night—just Thursdays, when my hands forget
The Slow Arithmetic of Love
We don't say I love you anymore. We say: your phone is at eleven percent. We say: I picked up the thing
Unsent
I write you letters in my head on the bus, in the shower, in the three seconds
The Chair by the Window
My father's chair still faces the window where he watched the street as if expecting a delivery
After the Funeral
The strangest part is the ordinary: how the fridge still hums its one note, how the bills arrive
The Ones Who Stay
You are not the friend who arrives with flowers. You are the friend
Parallel Lives
We are forty now and live in different cities with different groceries. You buy oat milk. I buy the regular kind.
The Map of Enough
I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window,
My Mother's Hands
My mother's hands could find a fever through a forehead, could tell a melon's ripeness
The Workshop
My father's workshop smelled of pine and something electrical— the ozone ghost of a drill
Portrait with Bobby Pins
She does this thing with bobby pins— holds three between her lips like small dark fish
What I Mean When I Say His Name
I mean the way he folds the map even though the phone knows where we are. I mean the scar above his eyebrow
After Rain
After the rainfall, a snail draws its silver line across the stone step.
November Field
November twilight— the scarecrow still stands alone. Sparrows left in June.
Grace
I don't know what I believe but I know the feeling when the light hits the kitchen table
Good Dog
You have never asked me how my day was and yet you are the only one
The Fog Inside
It isn't sadness. Sadness has a shape— you can walk around it, point to it, explain it to a doctor
August, and Everything After
August is a thief who comes dressed as a gift: the peach at its most golden
Winter Kitchen
The windows fog with everything we've made— the stew, the bread, the kettle's weary sigh— and past the glass the garden starts to fade
The House at the End of Sleep
Every night I visit a house I have never lived in but my hands know where the light switch is.
A Hymn in Four Seasons
Praise the cracking open of the seed, the blind ambition of the buried root, the robin's first bewildered, breathless creed
Ode to the Body at Forty
O body, you magnificent disaster, you creak now getting out of chairs and take the stairs a half-beat slower