War poems

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Those Graves In Rome

© Larry Levis

There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing

from Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

© Cecilia Woloch

In Warsaw, blackbird girls
swoop down in flocks
the old town square
a swirl of dark-eyed dark-haired girls

Unto Us...

© Spike Milligan

Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!

Maveric

© Spike Milligan

Maveric Prowles
Had Rumbling Bowles
That thundered in the night.
It shook the bedrooms all around

InheritanceHis

© Audre Lorde

Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?

The Horses

© Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,

The Castle

© Edwin Muir

All through that summer at ease we lay,
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away
They seemed no threat to us at all.

Scotland's Winter

© Edwin Muir

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.

Scotland 1941

© Edwin Muir

We were a tribe, a family, a people.
Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,
And all may read the folio of our fable,
Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.

Alexandrian Kings

© Constantine Cavafy

The Alexandrians were gathered
to see Cleopatra's children,
Caesarion, and his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, whom for the first

He wrapped them carefully, neatly
in costly green silk.Roses of ruby, lilies of pearl,
violets of amethyst. As he himself judged,as he wanted them, they look beautiful to him; not as he saw
or studied them in nature. He will leave them in the safe,a sample of his daring and skillful craft.

Candles

© Constantine Cavafy

The days of our future stand in front of us
like a row of little lit candles --
golden, warm, and lively little candles.

Shema

© Primo Levi

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

La Regina Avrillouse

© Ezra Pound

Lady of rich allure,
Queen of the spring's embrace,
Your arms are long like boughs of ash,
Mid laugh-broken streams, spirit of rain unsure,

Invern

© Ezra Pound

Earth's winter cometh
And I being part of all
And sith the spirit of all moveth in me
I must needs bear earth's winter

Lament of the Frontier Guard

© Ezra Pound

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)

© Ezra Pound

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --

In the Old Age of the Soul

© Ezra Pound

I do not choose to dream; there cometh on me
Some strange old lust for deeds.
As to the nerveless hand of some old warrior
The sword-hilt or the war-worn wonted helmet

Portrait d'Une Femme

© Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,