War poems
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When the World as We Knew It Ended
© Joy Harjo
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
© André Breton
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
The Hills in Half Light
© Patricia Goedicke
Or will we be lost forever?
In the silence of the last breath
Light
© C. K. Williams
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—
Poem
© Katha Pollitt
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
Yarrow Revisited
© André Breton
The gallant Youth, who may have gained,
Or seeks, a "winsome Marrow,"
Buick
© Ishmael Reed
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
© Stevie Smith
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
The Old Meeting House
© Alfred Noyes
(new jersey, 1918)
Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn.
Those wise old elms could hear no cry
Of all that distant agony
Only the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.
from Totem Poem [In the yellow time of pollen]
© Luke Davies
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
The Redshifting Web
© Wole Soyinka
5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,
the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.
Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
© John Keats
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedgesedge Grasslike or rushlike plant that grows in wet areas. has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Nocturnal
© Stephen Edgar
It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
Affairs
© Cesare Pavese
Dawn on the black hill, and up on the roof
cats drowsing. Last night, there was a boy
Eating the Pig
© Donald Hall
Then a young woman cuts off his head.
It comes off so easily, like a detachable part.
With sudden enthusiasm we dismantle the pig,
we wrench his trotters off, we twist them
at shoulder and hip, and they come off so easily.
Then we cut open his belly and pull the skin back.
My Brother, the Artist, at Seven
© Philip Levine
As a boy he played alone in the fields
behind our block, six frame houses
