War poems
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A Calendar of Sonnets: March
© Helen Hunt Jackson
Month which the warring ancients strangely styled
The month of war,--as if in their fierce ways
Were any month of peace!--in thy rough days
I find no war in Nature, though the wild
A Calendar of Sonnets: January
© Helen Hunt Jackson
O Winter! frozen pulse and heart of fire,
What loss is theirs who from thy kingdom turn
Dismayed, and think thy snow a sculptured urn
Of death! Far sooner in midsummer tire
The Distant Winter
© Philip Levine
The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids.
"Stephan! Stephan!" The rattling orderly
Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands:
Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea,
In A Light Time
© Philip Levine
The alder shudders in the April winds
off the moon. No one is awake and yet
sunlight streams across
the hundred still beds
Salts And Oils
© Philip Levine
In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog
believing it was Peking duck. Later,
in Tampa I bunked with an insane sailor
who kept a .38 Smith and Wesson in his shorts.
Making It Work
© Philip Levine
3-foot blue cannisters of nitro
along a conveyor belt, slow fish
speaking the language of silence.
On the roof, I in my respirator
Picture Postcard From The Other World
© Philip Levine
Since I don't know who will be reading
this or even if it will be read, I must
invent someone on the other end
of eternity, a distant cousin laboring
The Whole Soul
© Philip Levine
Is it long as a noodle
or fat as an egg? Is it
lumpy like a potato or
ringed like an oak or an
Where We Live Now
© Philip Levine
We live here because the houses
are clean, the lawns run
right to the street
The Return
© Philip Levine
All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
Voyages
© Philip Levine
Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart --
I walk by sedge and brown river rot
to where the old lake boats went daily out.
All the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen
Belle Isle, 1949
© Philip Levine
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School--Detroit, 1942
© Philip Levine
He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one
I Sing The Body Electric
© Philip Levine
People sit numbly at the counter
waiting for breakfast or service.
Today it's Hartford, Connecticut
more than twenty-five years after
Bitterness
© Philip Levine
Here in February, the fine
dark branches of the almond
begin to sprout tiny clusters
of leaves, sticky to the touch.
Night Thoughts Over A Sick Child
© Philip Levine
Numb, stiff, broken by no sleep,
I keep night watch. Looking for
signs to quiet fear, I creep
closer to his bed and hear
Waking In March
© Philip Levine
Last night, again, I dreamed
my children were back at home,
small boys huddled in their separate beds,
and I went from one to the other
An Ending
© Philip Levine
Early March.
The cold beach deserted. My kids
home in a bare house, bundled up
and listening to rock music
The Manuscript of Saint Alexius
© Augusta Davies Webster
But, when my father thought my words took shape
of other than boy's prattle, he grew grave,
and answered me "Alexius, thou art young,
and canst not judge of duties; but know this
thine is to serve God, living in the world."
