502 War poems

Little did I dream, England, that you bore me Under the Cotswold hills beside the water meadows,

The puppy must be learned of all this material. No map of the hospital. First, the war effort. Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them. This plot is to be played out in the buildings known to us. Swim for the stick, baby! You’ve got an anti-sink device. The nba guard flips forward and back in his hologram. Fish-fission. Light. —and found wheels beneath her linen skirt. The kids mill around like businessmen-clowns. Their organization is a matter of choice and thus not protected under reedlight. Candlelight. Horizonto-rotary gaze beating clearly to the right. Now, corrected, to the left. Fish! Flip! and Out of Hearing! Alone in the pink apartment with your little swab. The moth-mom tries out everything at once: straps on wool, ties a candle to her head. Don’t pity her. She wants to eat the moth! Which dithers over whether it eats wool or flame. The skyline lifts, and the gulfstream slips out barefoot clear to England. Maidens rhinocently down the cowpath clomp. Toothbrush into yogurt cup,Recyclamente! I am so adamant. The siren with a catch in its cry starts over. Eternal transistance. Ent’ring our marriage ride.

Derelict thoughts (scattered over the South Pacific) of one dying in the ship’s hold somewhere between 15–30 degrees latitude and 135–150 degrees southern longitude at the crux of time stretched to its limit.

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small) And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul. Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned; “For,” said the paper, “when this war is done The men's first instinct will be making homes. Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes, It being certain war has just begun. Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,— The sons we offered might regret they died If we got nothing lasting in their stead. We must be solidly indemnified. Though all be worthy Victory which all bought. We rulers sitting in this ancient spot Would wrong our very selves if we forgot The greatest glory will be theirs who fought, Who kept this nation in integrity.” Nation?—The half-limbed readers did not chafe But smiled at one another curiously Like secret men who know their secret safe. (This is the thing they know and never speak, That England one by one had fled to France Not many elsewhere now save under France). Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week, And people in whose voice real feeling rings Say: How they smile! They're happy now, poor things.

it was right about the time they started drafting for the iraqi war snookie came to sign up but he didn’t walk through the door, instead he leaped like a madman right through the plate glass & kicked the recruiting sergeant square in his no-good ass he said, “i wanna go to the desert, kill some arab chump & drink his hot blood like water from a barnyard pump i wanna get bit on my nose by a scorpion wit a bad attitude i wanna smoke twelve packs a day & eat snake heart for food i wanna drink poison gas with a side order of sand & dance with a nuclear missile while digging the junkyard band i wanna jump in an oil well & get real slick then have me a party with some them mooslim chicks cause i’m snookie johnson from a bad neighborhood & when i get ciced up i don’t mean nobody good so sign me up sergeant & sign me up fast i’m just raring to kick me some motherfuckin ass” the sergeant looked at snookie with nothing but disgust knowing he was the kind of nigga can’t nobody trust “you too damn crazy for the military,” the sarge said wit a frown snookie gave him a sheet of paper & said, “yo man, write dat down.”

They’re worse than weak links in chains, which we can blame on blacksmiths’ fire, and chinks in armor, made by rain of arrows. Soft spots, those parts of us that bruise, prove we’re fruit that rots as hourglasses ooze. But I’ve a soft spot for, a phrase we tend to whisper, is what we say before we name our guilty pleasure— the damper pedal that pounds sonatas into mush the critic Ezra Pound would call, with a shudder, slush.

December has frozen its double-edged breath and blows it down from the icy heavens, like a dry fire coming apart in threads, like a huge ruin that topples on soldiers. Snow where horses have left their hoof-marks is a solitude of grief that gallops on. Snow like split fingernails, or claws badly worn, like a malice out of heaven or a final contempt. It bites, prunes, cuts through with the heavy slash of a bloodshot and pale marble ax. It comes down, it falls everywhere like some ruined embrace of canyons and wings, solitude and snow. This violence that splits off from the core of winter, raw hunger tired of being hungry and cold, hangs over the naked with an eternal grudge that is white, speechless, dark, starving, and fatal. It wants to soften down forges, hatred, flames, it wants to stop up the seas, to bury all loves. It goes along throwing up huge, gauzy drifts, hostile hunks of glass, statues that say nothing. I want the heart made of wood in every shop and textile factory to flood over and cover the bodies that ignite the morning with their looks and yells, boots and rifles. Clothes for the corpses that are able to go naked, able to go dressed in frost and ice, in withered stone that fights off the cruel beaks, the pale beak thrusts and the pale escapes. Clothes for corpses that silently fall back the most snowy attacks with the reddest bones. Because these soldiers have sun-fired bones, because they are fires with footprints and eyes. The cold hunches forward, death loses its leaves. I can hear the noiseless sound raining down. Red on the white snow, life turns the steamy snow red, sows fire in the snow. Soldiers are so much like rock crystals that only fire, only flame shapes them, and they fight with icy cheekbones, with their mouths, and turn whatever they attack into memories of ash.

To Francis Fowler Hogan I think at first like us he did not see The goal to which the screaming eagles flew; For romance lured him, France, and chivalry; But Oh! Before the end he knew, he knew! And gave his first full love to Liberty, And met her face to face one lurid night While the guns boomed their shuddering minstrelsy And all the Argonne glowed with demon light. And Liberty herself came through the wood, And with her dear, boy lover kept the tryst; Clasped in her grand, Greek arms he understood Whose were the fatal lips that he had kissed— Lipes that the soul of Youth has loved from old— Hot lips of Liberty that kiss men cold.

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Poetry Out Loud Note : This poem has had two titles: “The Soldier” and “Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier”. The student may give either title during the recitation.

Saturday afternoon. The barracks is almost empty. The soldiers are almost all on overnight pass. There is only me, writing this letter to you, And one other soldier, down at the end of the room, And a spider, that hangs by the thread of his guts, His tenacious and delicate guts, Swift’s spider, All self-regard, or else all privacy. The dust drifts in the sunlight around him, as currents Lie in lazy, drifting schools in the vast sea. In his little sea the spider lowers himself Out of his depth. He is his own diving bell, Though he cannot see well. He observes no fish, And sees no wonderful things. His unseeing guts Are his only hold on the world outside himself. I love you, and miss you, and I find you hard to imagine. Down at the end of the room, the other soldier Is getting ready, I guess, to go out on pass. He is shining his boots. He sits on the edge of his bunk, Private, submissive, and heedful of himself, And, bending over himself, he is his own nest. The slightest sound he makes is of his being. He is his mother, and nest, wife, brother, and father. His boots are bright already, yet still he rubs And rubs till, brighter still, they are his mirror, And in this mirror he observes, I guess, His own submissiveness. He is far from home.