Poetry

[Derf]

I've got a friend who reads Wilfred Owen almost every time our poetry group meets (monthly). She is very taken with his imagery.

I am not a veteran, but here is my war poem:

One Week After the War

One week after the war,
I lay on the gurney, still as a headstone,
The only casualty of a battle
No one noticed,
An invisible soldier
Who jumped on a grenade he threw,
In order to save himself from an attack he instigated.
The heated skirmish raged for days,
Palpable hatred napalming
Both sides, hemmed in as they were in one body.
This was a war no one would win—
There weren't even any
Mercenary arms dealers to profit from the destruction.
People passed near by the front
Without a glance at the carnage.
Some even smiled and spoke,
But I couldn't hear them
Over the chaotic din of the duel:
Two war-ravaged adversaries,
Neither expecting a victory because winning was off the table.
I was just a grunt now,
Mechanically fighting against the enemy
Because someone told me to.
That someone may have been me, but I couldn't remember for sure.
All around were bombs exploding in clouds of paralyzing fear
And incendiary ordnance riddling my numbed body with the
Hellfire of doubt and self-loathing.
The enemy, both a reflection of me
And invisible in the darkness that clouded my eyes and heart,
Charged again and again,
Ignoring my increasingly pitiful resistance.
I cried for help. I begged for backup.
But the words died on lips parched and cracked
From days of fighting without eating.
Then, in the very picture of irony,
Both sides raised a white flag
As exhaustion sapped me of the will to fight.
And so I lay,
A victim of an invisible war
Being fought for no reason
With an outcome that made the whole thing pointless.

[ER]

Ivan Ivanovitch, Pragmatist

Ivan Ivanovitch was a pragmatist who kept his standards and expectations low.

In 1913, before the War and Revolution,
He had a house, five pigs, three goats, twenty chickens,
An ox, a small boat, three changes of clothes,
A grim wife, a cynical faith in Holy Church,
A nebulous image of God,
An oldest daughter often ill-used by the bastard son
Of the provincial tax assessor,
Three axes, four knives, two icons,
A holy relic bartered from a river-gypsy from Smolensk,
And a still hidden in the reeds.

Ivan Ivanovitch, after the Revolution, in 1923,
Had a house, a pig, two goats, twenty chickens,
A small boat, three changes of clothes,
A nebulous image of right and wrong,
A youngest daughter ill-used by a Bolshevik tax assessor,
Three axes, three knives,
A holy relic bartered from a river gypsy from Smolensk,
Eight phrases from Das Kapitol stuck in his head,
And a trio of stills hidden in the reeds.

Ivan Ivanovitch was a pragmatist who kept his standards and expectations low.

[ER]

(From) A Song of Myself

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
---Walt Whitman

[ER]

Digging 

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

---Seamus Heaney 

[indianasmith]

I composed this in my head on the way to town today, while in a very giddy frame of mind:

If I were a lungfish, and shrimp were my favorite dish,
I'd eat a clam.
For some variety, and to show piety
To Neptune of the Sea
Whose fish I am.

It fits perfectly to the tune of the old church hymn: "My Faith Looks Up to Thee."

[ER]

I like it, Indy!

[ER]

After enduring a Soviet Far Eastern prison, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded there was nothing worse in life than physical pain. With respect to his direct experience, I think losing someone you love gives bodily pain a run for its money, and when I was twenty-one and entombed by grief, I used to read this poem over and over and over and over, not because it relieved me like, say In Memoriam, or Thanatopsis, but because it tortured me worse.

Sorry if it is vulgar to put it this way, but back then this poem, which doesn't seem so significant now, f**ked me up.


And You Must Die


And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,—this wonder fled.
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

[indianasmith]

Way too serious.  I prefer this one:

"The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The mighty bear whose potent hug
was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I'm not feeling well myself."

Ogden Nash

[Trevor]

This poem freaked me out in high school:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . ."

[ER]

A flea and a fly in a flue,

Were caught, so what could they do?

Said the fly, "Let us flee."

"Let us fly," said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

[ER]

Dislike

If he was a dog
And you were a flower,
He'd hike his leg,
And give you a shower.

--Old '80s jump-rope chant

[Rev. Powell]

This one makes me think of my aging parents.

"Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We two shall wander, hand in hand,
Forbearing for old friendship's sake
Nor grieve because our love was gay
Which now is ended in this way.

A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves — they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.

Now, O now, we hear no more
The vilanelle and roundelay!
Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything —
The year, the year is gathering."
---XXXIII, James Joyce

[javakoala]

There once was a fat man from Leeds,
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
Within half an hour,
His dick was a flower,
And his balls were all covered in weeds,
                               -Morgan Freeman, 1995

[ER]

I like to read poems in cemeteries, and a day like this, so cold out that I am alone, is in some ways most perfect of all for the undertaking.

A Golden Day

I found you and I lost you,
All on a gleaming day.
The day was filled with sunshine,
And the land was full of May.

A golden bird was singing
Its melody divine,
I found you and I loved you,
And all the world was mine.

I found you and I lost you,
All on a golden day,
But when I dream of you, dear,
It is always brimming May.

--Paul Laurence Dunbar

[indianasmith]

I have always loved this one from THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT:

"Seven wards of ancient lore, for Land's protection, wall and door
And one High Lord to wield the Law, keep incorrupt all Earthpower's core.
Seven words for ill's despite, banes for evil's dooming wight,
and one pure Lord to hold the Staff, bar the Land from Foul's betraying sight.
Seven hells for broken faith, for Land's betrayer, man or wraith,
and one brave Lord to deal the doom, keep the blacking blight from beauty's bloom."

Stephen R. Donaldson