The Art of the Anti-War Poem
These are some of the best anti-war poems, along with a few I wrote myself. Included is the first anti-war poem, "Lament to the Spirit of War," by the ancient Sumerian poet Enheduanna, circa 2250 BCE.
Which poets wrote the best war and anti-war poems? Picking the greatest war and anti-war poems of all time was a subjective task, so please keep in mind that this page is based on one person's opinions. In my opinion Wilfred Owen is the greatest of the anti-war poets, so I will begin with my tribute poem for him:
At Wilfred Owen's Grave
by Michael R. Burch
A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone's,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare's. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for one brief flurry: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.
Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of "ergotherapists" that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful's merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath's transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.
Originally published by The Chariton Review
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1914, the year World War I began. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University, where he studied under Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and worked as a control tower operator during World War II, an experience which influenced and provided material for his poetry. Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945 with the publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend, which "bitterly and dramatically documents the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers."
The ancient Greeks were truth-tellers when it came to war and the immense sacrifices made by valiant soldiers in defense of their countrymen ...
Athenian Epitaphs
Passerby,
Tell the Spartans we lie
Lifeless at Thermopylae:
Dead at their word,
Obedient to their command.
Have they heard?
Do they understand?
Simonides, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Here he lies in state tonight: great is his Monument!
Yet Ares cares not, neither does War relent.
Anacreon, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
They observed our fearful fetters, braved the encircling darkness.
Now we extol their excellence: bravely, they died for us.
Manaslecas, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be,
But go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.
Plato, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Be ashamed, O mountains and seas: these were men of valorous breath.
Assume, like pale chattels, an ashen silence at death.
Michael R. Burch, after Parmenio
These men earned a crown of imperishable glory,
Nor did the maelstrom of death obscure their story.
Michael R. Burch, after Simonides
Does my soul abide in heaven, or hell?
Only the sea gulls in their high, lonely circuits may tell.
Michael R. Burch, after Glaucus
Blame not the gale, or the inhospitable sea-gulf, or friends’ tardiness,
Mariner! Just man’s foolhardiness.
Michael R. Burch, after Leonidas of Tarentum
Now that I am dead sea-enclosed Cyzicus shrouds my bones.
Faretheewell, O my adoptive land that nurtured me, that held me;
I take rest at your breast.
—Michael R. Burch, after Erycius
Stranger, flee!
But may Fortune grant you all the prosperity
she denied me.
Michael R. Burch, after Leonidas of Tarentum
Some of the most powerful poems I have ever read are inscriptions found on the tombstones of ancient Greeks. So I created a small collection of English epigrams modeled after epitaphs gleaned from ancient Greek gravestones and called the collection "Athenian Epitaphs."
Unfortunately, the only completely intact poem left by the immortal Sappho of Lesbos is her "Ode to Aphrodite" or "Hymn to Aphrodite" (an interesting synchronicity since Sappho is best known as a love poet and Aphrodite was the ancient Greek goddess of love). However, the poem below, variously titled “The Anactoria Poem,” “Helen’s Eidolon” and “Some People Say ...” is largely intact. Was Sappho the author of the world's first "make love, not war" poem?
Sappho, fragment 16
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Warriors on rearing chargers,
columns of infantry,
fleets of warships:
some call these the dark earth's redeeming visions.
But I say—
the one I desire.
And this makes sense
because she who so vastly surpassed all other mortals in beauty
—Helen—
seduced by Aphrodite, led astray by desire,
lightly set sail for distant Troy,
abandoning her celebrated husband,
leaving behind her parents and child!
Her story reminds me of Anactoria,
who has also departed,
and whose lively dancing and lovely face
I would rather see than all the horsemen and war-chariots of the Lydians,
or all their infantry parading in flashing armor.
Enheduanna, the daughter of the famous King Sargon the Great of Akkad, is the first ancient writer whose name remains known today. She appears to be the first named poet in human history and the first known author of prayers and hymns. Enheduanna, who lived circa 2285-2250 BCE, is also one of the first women we know by name. And as far as I have been able to determine, she wrote the first anti-war poem over 4,000 years ago!
Lament to the Spirit of War
by Enheduanna
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You hack down everything you see, War God!
Rising on fearsome wings
you rush to destroy our land:
raging like thunderstorms,
howling like hurricanes,
screaming like tempests,
thundering, raging, ranting, drumming,
whiplashing whirlwinds!
Men falter at your approaching footsteps.
Tortured dirges scream on your lyre of despair.
Like a fiery Salamander you poison the land:
growling over the earth like thunder,
vegetation collapsing before you,
blood gushing down mountainsides.
Spirit of hatred, greed and vengeance!
Dominatrix of heaven and earth!
Your ferocious fire consumes our land.
Whipping your stallion
with furious commands,
you impose our fates.
You triumph over all human rites and prayers.
Who can explain your tirade,
why you carry on so?
The Lost Pilot
by James Tate
for my father, 1922-1944
Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him
yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare
as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot
like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their
distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive
orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,
with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested
scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not
turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You
could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what
it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least
once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,
I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.
My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,
fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake
that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.
Tate's poem is what one might call an "unfortunate masterpiece." We wish with all our hearts, minds and souls that such poems didn't have to be written. But then we go to war and make them inevitable, whenever rare poets like Tate are able to communicate thoughts and feelings almost beyond comprehension. I am glad that we have such a magnificent and important poem. I am very sorry for what Tate and so many other fatherless and motherless children suffered, due to mankind's wars. I hope enough people will read such poems and take them to heart, so that we can prevent such terrible things from happening again. But as I write this, Trump is threatening war with Iran after backing out of a peace treaty our nation should have honored ...
È la solita storia: Remembering Bach Mai, Yemen, Ukraine and All the Faceless Dead
by Bob Zisk
It was the end of Advent in seventy-two,
The Magi came in a B-52.
The cribs were wheeled into the basement, where
The sick and dying shook and prayed in fear.
The bombs, like rotten manna out of hell,
Gave scarcely any warning as they fell
Earthward, and filled the air with burning dead.
Their human smoke circled overhead.
Today we point and raise a weak outcry
As other little children scream and die,
All nameless as the babies of Bach Mai.
È la solita storia: it's the same old story.
On Dec. 22, 1972, in the so called Christmas Bombing the U.S. bombed Hanoi. No fewer than one hundred bombs struck Bach Mai Hospital, killing at least twenty-eight staff and an unspecified number of patients who had sheltered in the basement. In 1998 Bach Mai Hospital opened a special rehabilitation unit sponsored by Veterans for America. In 2000 Japan sponsored a reconstruction project at the hospital.
I was a young man at the time of the Christmas Bombing Operation. To this day I am amazed at those wise men at my university who could talk with such passion about categorical imperatives and Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, but could not find the humanity to speak out or sign a public letter decrying the bombing of Bach Mai Hospital. But I suppose it is a mark of progress that there are now courses in military ethics for the men and women we send to do the terrible, the unspeakable in our name.
Hymn for Fallen Soldiers
by Michael R. Burch
Sound the awesome cannons.
Pin medals to each breast.
Attention, honor guard!
Give them a hero’s rest.
Recite their names to the heavens
Till the stars acknowledge their kin.
Then let the land they defended
Gather them in again.
When I learned there’s an American military organization, the DPAA (Defense/POW/MIA Accounting Agency) that is still finding and bringing home the bodies of soldiers who died serving their country in World War II, after blubbering like a baby, I managed to eke out this poem.
In my opinion, for whatever it's worth, the top ten war poets of all time are:
Sappho of Lesbos, the first of the "make love not war" poets
Alfred Tennyson, esp. "The War" and "Charge of the Light Brigade"
Thomas Hardy, esp. "Drummer Hodge" and "The Man He Killed"
Rudyard Kipling has been accused of jingoism but he showed empathy for soldiers in poems like "Common Form"
Rupert Brooke, esp. "Safety" and "The Soldier"
Siegfried Sassoon, esp. "Absolution," "Attack," "Dreamers," "Aftermath," "Banishment" and "The General"
Isaac Rosenberg, esp. "Dead Man's Dump," "God," "Louse Hunting," "August 1914" and "Break of Day in the Trenches"
Walt Whitman, esp. his poems about the Civil War, such as “The Wound Dresser,” and about Lincoln's assassination such as "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Captain, My Captain"
Miklós Radnóti, esp. the "Postcard" poems he wrote on the last days of a Nazi death march
Wilfred Owen, esp. "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Arms and the Boy," "The Unreturning," "Disabled," "Futility" and "Strange Meeting"
High Honorable Mention: Bertolt Brecht, Roy Campbell, Stephen Crane, Keith Douglas, Clifford Dyment, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Rudyard Kipling, Alun Lewis, Archibald MacLeish, Marjorie Pickthall, Henry Reed, Robert Service, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Harvey Stanbrough, Wallace Stevens, James Tate, Edward Thomas, Bruce Weigl, Philip Larkin and anti-war songwriters such as Pete Seeger, John Prine, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen
My top ten war poems, all but one of them anti-war poems, are:
"The Unreturning," "Strange Meeting," "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce Et Decorum Est" are powerful, graphic war poems by Wilfred Owen
"Memorial Rain" by Archibald MacLeish, an elegy he wrote for his brother Kenneth who died in WWII
"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell
Walt Whitman's poems about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
"The Lost Pilot" by James Tate is a poem about a boy's loss of his father
"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" by William Butler Yeats was written for Robert Gregory, the son of his patron Lady Gregory
"In Flanders Fields" by John McCrea and "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger are two of the best-known poetic memorials for fallen soldiers
"Wulf and Eadwacer" is an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem that reminds us of the heavy toll war takes on women and children, as well as fighting men
"Charge of the Light Brigade" by Lord Alfred Tennyson
"Drummer Hodge" by Thomas Hardy
High Honorable Mention: "Fast Rode the Knight" by Stephen Crane, "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed, "The Dug-Out" by Siegfried Sassoon, "The Man He Killed" by Thomas Hardy, "MCMXIV" (1914) by Philip Larkin, "The Death of a Soldier" by Wallace Stevens, "Here Dead Lie We" by A. E. Housman, “Gethsemane” by Rudyard Kipling
Excerpts from "More Poems," XXXVI
by A. E. Housman
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
I have loved these four lines by Housman since I first read them. Housman could write movingly without indulging in images, melodrama or sophistry, and like Shakespeare was a master of direct statement. Housman is certainly a major poet, and one of our very best critics of society and religion, along with Blake, Twain and Wilde. A good number of his poems can be found on the Masters page of The HyperTexts.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is from Horace's Odes and means: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." This is one of the first graphic anti-war poems in the English language, and almost certainly still the best. Wilfred Owen is a war poet without peer, and one of the first great modern poets. There are more poems by Wilfred Owen later on this page.
Let Us Be Midwives!
by Hiroshima survivor Sadako Kurihara
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. BurchMidnight . . .
the basement of a shattered building . . .
atomic bomb survivors sniveling in the darkness . . .
not a single candle between them . . .
the odor of blood . . .
the stench of death . . .
the sickly-sweet smell of decaying humanity . . .
the groans . . .
the moans . . .
Out of all that, suddenly, miraculously, a voice:
"The baby's coming!"
In the hellish basement, unexpectedly,
a young mother has gone into labor.
In the dark, lacking a single match, what to do?
Scrambling to her side,
forgetting their own . . .
Hiroshima Child
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I come to beg at every door,
but who can hear my phantom tread?
I knock and yet remain unseen,
for I am dead,
for I am dead.
I’m only seven, though I died
in Hiroshima so long ago.
I’m seven now, as I was then,
for how can phantom children grow?
White incandescence charred my hair;
my eyes grew dim, then I was blind;
my fragile bones became fine ash;
my ash was scattered by the wind.
Today I need no fruit, no rice;
I crave no sweets, nor even bread.
I beg for nothing for myself,
for I am dead,
for I am dead.
All that I beg of you is peace:
You fight today! You fight today!
Peace, so earth’s living children may
live and grow and laugh and play.
Oh, fallen camellias,
if I were you,
I'd leap into the torrent!
— Takaha Shugyo, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Wulf and Eadwacer (Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 960-990 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My people pursue him like crippled game.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.
Wulf's on one island; I'm on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
There are bloodthirsty curs on this island.
They'll rip apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.
My thoughts pursued Wulf like panting hounds.
Whenever it rained—how I wept!—
the boldest cur took me in his paws.
Good feelings, to a point, but the end loathsome.
Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your infrequent visits
have left me famished, deprived of real meat!
Do you hear, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods.
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.
"Wulf and Eadwacer" is an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem that reminds us of the heavy toll war takes on women and children, as well as combatants. This is one of the oldest poems in the English language, and is quite possibly the first extant English poem by a female poet. It is also one of the first English poems to employ a refrain.
Gethsemane
by Rudyard Kipling
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass—we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.
It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!
Common Form
by Rudyard Kipling
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Equality of Sacrifice
by Rudyard Kipling
A. “I was a Have.” B. “I was a ‘have-not.’”
(Together). “What hast thou given which I gave not?”
Rudyard Kipling has been accused of being an "imperialist," an apologist for the British Empire, and writing jingoistic poems. But poems like these suggest that he was far from a gung-ho advocate of war.
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrea
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
During World War I, in the Second Battle of Ypres, a young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by a German artillery shell on May 2, 1915. He had been serving in the same Canadian artillery unit as his friend, the Canadian poet, doctor and artillery commander Major John McCrae. McCrae was asked to conduct the burial service for Helmer because the chaplain had been called away that evening. It is believed that McCrae began the first draft of his now-famous poem after the service. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae discarded it. "In Flanders Fields" was first published on December 8, 1915 in the London-based magazine Punch. The poem is a rondeau. Poppies are sleep-inducing and often sprang up quickly over the graves of soldiers buried in the Ypres area.
Postcard 1
by Miklós Radnóti
written August 30, 1944
translated by Michael R. Burch
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —
still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree.
Postcard 2
by Miklós Radnóti
written October 6, 1944 near Crvenka, Serbia
translated by Michael R. Burch
A few miles away they're incinerating
the haystacks and the houses,
while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
the shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
Now, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
sets the silver water a-ripple
while, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
seem to swim like drifting clouds ...
Postcard 3
by Miklós Radnóti
written October 24, 1944 near Mohács, Hungary
translated by Michael R. Burch
The oxen dribble bloody spittle;
the men pass blood in their piss.
Our stinking regiment halts, a horde of perspiring savages,
adding our aroma to death's repulsive stench.
Postcard 4
by Miklós Radnóti
his final poem, written October 31, 1944 near Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary
translated by Michael R. Burch
I toppled beside him — his body already taut,
tight as a string just before it snaps,
shot in the back of the head.
"This is how you’ll end too; just lie quietly here,"
I whispered to myself, patience blossoming from dread.
"Der springt noch auf," the voice above me jeered;
I could only dimly hear
through the congealing blood slowly sealing my ear.
In my opinion, Miklós Radnóti is the greatest of the Holocaust poets, and one of the very best anti-war poets, along with Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and singer-songwriters Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Futility
by Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved— still warm— too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
"Futility" was one of just five poems by Wilfred Owen to be published before his death at age 25, a week before the armistice that ended World War I in 1918.
Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The obscuring mirror of my era
broke
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters monopolized its maze.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
by Alan Seeger
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear ...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
by William Butler Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
W. B. Yeats was probably the last of the great Romantics, and the first of the great Modernists. He wrote a good number of truly great poems, and remains an essential poet of the highest rank. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a wonderful poem that illustrates how the people who die in war often have little to gain and everything to lose. Several of Yeats's poems can be found on the Masters page of The HyperTexts.
MCMXIV (1914)
by Philip Larkin
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word―the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
MCMXIV is 1914 in Roman numerology: the year Great Britain entered World War I. The poem describes the long lines of men queuing up to join the British military. The Domesday Book was a massive survey commissioned by William the Conqueror to determine his landholdings after invading and defeating England and becoming its ruler. The Domesday lines mentioned are presumably the lines established by William's surveyors to mark boundaries. Larkin was born after WWI and is speaking with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that modern warfare truly is hell, and that many of the recruits would die on the continent.
Break of Day in the Trenches
by Isaac Rosenberg
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
Isaac Rosenberg helps us see war as a theater of the absurd: He's sticking a poppy behind his ear while sharing a hole with a rat whose "cosmopolitan sympathies" allow it to consort with both sides. There are more poems by Rosenberg later on this page.
The Dug-Out
by Siegfried Sassoon
Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadowed from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head ...
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.
Siegfried Sassoon is remembered today as a poet who wrote realistically about World War I, with tremendous empathy and without artifice. Sassoon wrote the introduction to the collected poems of Isaac Rosenberg, who did not survive World War I.
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke
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.
This poem by Rupert Brooke has had two titles: "The Soldier" and "Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier."
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
"Dover Beach" may be one of the first modern poems due to its theme, tone and irregular rhyme scheme. When Arnold speaks of the "Sea of Faith" retreating, he seems to be setting the stage for Modernism, which to some degree was the reaction of men who began to increasingly suspect that the "wisdom" contained in the Bible was hardly the revelation of an all-knowing God.
Naming of Parts
by Henry Reed
"Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine glori"
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easily
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed is likely to be remembered by this one poem, but fortunately for him (and for us) it should make him immortal.
The Death of a Soldier
by Wallace Stevens
Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
He does not become a three-days' personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.
Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops.
When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.
Wallace Stevens is not generally considered to be among the war poets or anti-war poets, but in this poem he captures something of the loss of a soldier's life, and how the world continues on nonetheless.
1915
by Robert Graves
I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.
Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.
The Unreturning
by Wilfred Owen
Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.
There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled,
And never one fared back to me or spoke.
Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when sick men's sighs are drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering Wing which none unbinds,
I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.
Arms and the Boy
by Wilfred Owen
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
Hospital Barge At Cérisy
by Wilfred Owen
Budging the sluggard ripples of the Somme,
A barge round old Cérisy slowly slewed.
Softly her engines down the current screwed,
And chuckled softly with contented hum,
Till fairy tinklings struck their croonings dumb.
The waters rumpling at the stern subdued;
The lock-gate took her bulging amplitude;
Gently from out the gurgling lock she swum.
One reading by that calm bank shaded eyes
To watch her lessening westward quietly.
Then, as she neared the bend, her funnel screamed.
And that long lamentation made him wise
How unto Avalon, in agony,
Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.
Fast rode the knight
by Stephen Crane
Fast rode the knight
With spurs, hot and reeking,
Ever waving an eager sword,
"To save my lady!"
Fast rode the knight,
And leaped from saddle to war.
Men of steel flickered and gleamed
Like riot of silver lights,
And the gold of the knight's good banner
Still waved on a castle wall.
. . .
A horse,
Blowing, staggering, bloody thing,
Forgotten at foot of castle wall.
A horse
Dead at foot of castle wall.
Stephen Crane is best known today for his novel The Red Badge of Courage and short stories like The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. But he was an accomplished poet at an early age. Many of his poems, including the one above, fall into the eclectic category of "free verse parables." At the time Crane was writing, no other poet sounded like him, although other writers would later adopt his terse, no-nonsense style. Although he died prematurely at age 28, Crane became an influence on the early Modernists and writers like Ernest Hemingway. Crane rejected sentimentality and said: "A story should be logical in its action and faithful to character. Truth to life itself was the only test, the greatest artists were the simplest, and simple because they were true." We can also find the virtues of truthfulness and simplicity in his poems.
Dreamers
by Siegfried Sassoon
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
In the poem above, Siegfried Sassoon captures both the horror of war and how the "trivial" things we take for granted are not trivial at all to men in the trenches, to whom they have become like visions of heaven.
On Passing the New Menin Gate
by Siegfried Sassoon
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, Sassoon was called "Mad Jack" by his peers for his "near suicidal" exploits, which included scaring away sixty Germans with hand grenades, occupying their trench, then sitting down to read a book of poems! But the mad poet later became a pacifist and dissenter. When he returned to the battlefield in 1918, he was almost immediately shot in the head in a case of "friendly fire" and sat out the rest of the war, retiring with the rank of captain.
Banishment
by Siegfried Sassoon
I am banished from the patient men who fight
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,—
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.
Although Sassoon did not want to return to the battlefield, in the end he did. Here, he says that the same love that drove him to rebel (presumably against fighting) also drove him to "grope" through "hell" in order to "stand forgiven" in his men's tortured eyes.
The Immortals
by Isaac Rosenberg
I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea! all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest or sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight.
Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain—for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.
I killed and killed with slaughter mad;
I killed till all my strength was gone.
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die in fun.
I used to think the Devil hid
In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse.
I called him Satan, Balzebub.
But now I call him, dirty louse.
Louse Hunting
by Isaac Rosenberg
Nudes—stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.
Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons’ pantomime
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.
Returning, We Hear the Larks
by Isaac Rosenberg
Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
Through these Pale Cold Days
by Isaac Rosenberg
Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,
While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again—
For Lebanon's summer slope.
They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.
The Troop Ship
by Isaac Rosenberg
Grotesque and queerly huddled
Contortionists to twist
The sleepy soul to a sleep,
We lie all sorts of ways
And cannot sleep.
The wet wind is so cold,
And the lurching men so careless,
That, should you drop to a doze,
Wind’s fumble or men’s feet
Is on your face.
Untitled
by Charles Hamilton Sorley
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Charles Hamilton Sorley was just 20 years old when he died at the Battle of Loos in 1915. The Scottish war poet left his most famous poem untitled at his death. Robert Graves, a war poet himself, called Sorley "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war," along with Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. Sorley’s poems were published posthumously as Marlborough and Other Poems in 1916.
Other War and Anti-War Poems and Songs of Note
Siegfried Sassoon: "Absolution," "Attack," "Dreamers," "Aftermath," "On Passing the New Menin Gate," "Suicide in the Trenches," "Banishment," "The General" and "The Grandeur of Ghosts"
Walt Whitman: esp. his poems about the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination such as "Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
"When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" a traditional folk song by Louis Lambert (Patrick Gilmore)
Traditional Songs: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Dixie”
"Dead Man’s Dump" by Isaac Rosenberg
"The Battery Horse" by Lance-Corporal E. R. Henry
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" with lyrics by Julia Ward Howe
"For the Fallen" by Laurence Binyon
These are more anti-war poems of mine…
Hiroshima Shadows
by Michael R. Burch
Hiroshima shadows ... mother and child ...
Oh, when will our hearts ever be beguiled
to end mindless war ... to seek peace,
reconciled
to our common mortality?
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs burned permanent shadows of the human beings they annihilated into concrete walls.
Lucifer, to the Enola Gay
by Michael R. Burch
Go then, and give them my meaning
so that their teeming
streets
become my city.
Bring back a pretty
flower,
a chrysanthemum,
perhaps, to bloom
if but an hour,
within a certain room
of mine
where
the sun does not rise or fall,
and the moon,
although it is content to shine,
helps nothing at all.There,
if I hear the wistful call
of their voices
regretting choices
made
or perhaps not made
in time,
I can look back upon it and recall,
in all its pale forms sublime,
still
Death will never be holy again.
Bikini
by Michael R. Burch
Undersea, by the shale and the coral forming,
by the shell’s pale rose and the pearl’s bright eye,
through the sea’s green bed of lank seaweed worming
like tangled hair where cold currents rise ...
something lurks where the riptides sigh,
something old, and odd, and wise.
Something old when the world was forming
now lifts its beak, its snail-blind eye,
and, with tentacles like Medusa's squirming,
it feels the CLOUD blot out the skies' ...
then shudders, settles with a sigh,
understanding man’s demise.
Ali’s Song
by Michael R. Burch
They say that gold don’t tarnish. It ain’t so.
They say it has a wild, unearthly glow.
A man can be more beautiful, more wild.
I flung their medal to the river, child.
I flung their medal to the river, child.
They hung their coin around my neck; they made
my name a bridle, “called a spade a spade.”
They say their gold is pure. I say defiled.
I flung their slave’s name to the river, child.
I flung their slave’s name to the river, child.
Ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong
that never called me nigger, did me wrong.
A man can’t be lukewarm, ’cause God hates mild.
I flung their notice to the river, child.
I flung their notice to the river, child.
They said, “Now here’s your bullet and your gun,
and there’s your cell: we’re waiting, you choose one.”
At first I groaned aloud, but then I smiled.
I gave their “future” to the river, child.
I gave their “future” to the river, child.
My face reflected up, dark bronze like gold,
a coin God stamped in His own image—Bold.
My blood boiled like that river—strange and wild.
I died to hate in that dark river, child,
Come, be reborn in this bright river, child.
Cassius Clay, who converted to Islam and changed his “slave name” to Muhammad Ali, said that he threw his Olympic boxing gold medal into the Ohio River. Confirming his account, the medal was recovered by Robert Bradbury and his wife Pattie in 2014 during the Annual Ohio River Sweep, and the Ali family paid them $200,000 to regain possession of the medal. When drafted during the Vietnamese War, Ali refused to serve, reputedly saying: “I ain't got no quarrel with those Viet Cong; no Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.” My poem’s notice is Ali's draft notice, which metaphorically gets tossed into the river along with his slave name. “Ali’s Song” was originally published by the literary journal Black Medina.
Privilege
by Michael R. Burch
This poem is dedicated to Harvey Stanbrough, an ex-marine who was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and has written passionately and eloquently about the horror and absurdity of war in “Lessons for a Barren Population.”
No, I will never know
what you saw or what you felt,
thrust into the maw of Eternity,
watching the mortars nightly
greedily making their rounds,
hearing the soft damp hiss
of men’s souls like helium escaping
their collapsing torn bodies,
or lying alone, feeling the great roar
of your own heart.
But I know:
there is a bitter knowledge
of death I have not achieved.
Thus in thankful ignorance,
and especially for my son
and for all who benefit so easily
at so unthinkable a price,
I thank you.
War is Obsolete
by Michael R. Burch
"If we are to carry out a real war against war, we will have to begin with the children." — Gandhi
War is obsolete;
even the strange machinery of dread
weeps for the child in the street
who cannot lift her head
to reprimand the Man
who failed to countermand
her soft defeat.
But war is obsolete;
even the cold robotic drone
that flies far overhead
has sense enough to moan
and shudder at her plight
(only men bereft of Light
with hearts indurate stone
embrace war’s Siberian night.)
For war is obsolete;
man’s tribal “gods,” long dead,
have fled his awakening sight
while the true Sun, overhead,
has pity on her plight.
O sweet, precipitate Light! —
embrace her, reject the night
that leaves gentle fledglings dead.
For each brute ancestor lies
with his totems and his “gods”
in the slavehold of premature night
that awaited him in his tomb;
while Love, the ancestral womb,
still longs to give birth to the Light.
So which child shall we murder tonight,
or which Ares condemn to the gloom?
While campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump insisted that, as commander-in-chief of the American military, he would order American soldiers to track down and murder women and children as "retribution" for acts of terrorism. When disbelieving journalists asked Trump if he could possibly have meant what he said, he verified several times that he did.
Shock and Awe
by Michael R. Burch
With megatons of “wonder,”
we make our godhead clear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.The world’s heart ripped asunder,
its dying pulse we hear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.Strange Trinity! We ponder
this God we hold so dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.The vulture and the condor
proclaim: The feast is near!—
Death. Destruction. Fear.Soon He will plow us under;
the Anti-Christ is here:
Death. Destruction. Fear.We love to hear Him thunder!
With Shock and Awe, appear!—
Death. Destruction. Fear.For God can never blunder;
we know He holds US dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.
Momentum! Momentum!
by Michael R. Burch
for the neo-Cons
Crossing the Rubicon, we come!
Momentum! Momentum! Furious hooves!
The Gauls we have slaughtered, no man disapproves.
War’s hawks shrieking-strident, white doves stricken dumb.
Coo us no cooings of pale-breasted peace!
Momentum! Momentum! Imperious hooves!
The blood of barbarians brightens our greaves.
Pompey’s head in a basket? We slumber at ease.
Seduce us again, great Bellona, dark queen!
Momentum! Momentum! Curious hooves
Now pound out strange questions, but what can they mean
As the great stallions rear and their riders careen?
Bellona was the Roman goddess of war. The name "Bellona" derives from the Latin word for "war" (bellum), and is linguistically related to the English word "belligerent" (literally, "war-waging"). In earlier times she was called Duellona, that name being derived from a more ancient word for "battle."
Death
loomed at the end of the hall
in the long shadows . . .
― Watanabe Hakusen, translation by Michael R. Burch
With their love of weaponry Americans have turned school hallways into war zones. I translated this poem as "Sandy Hook Hallways Haiku" after the massacre.
Stormfront
by Michael R. Burch
Our distance is frightening:
a distance like the abyss between heaven and earth
interrupted by bizarre and terrible lightning.
Childless
by Michael R. Burch
How can she bear her grief?
Mightier than Atlas, she shoulders the weight
of one fallen star.
A theme of my anti-war poems is the terrible price children and their mothers pay for alpha-male warlust.
Piercing the Shell
by Michael R. Burch
If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we'll discover what the heart is for.
Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch
It's not that every leaf must finally fall,
it's just that we can never catch them all.
Styx
by Michael R. Burch
Black waters,
deep and dark and still . . .
all men have passed this way,
or will.
Modern Charon
by Michael R. Burch
I, too, have stood—paralyzed at the helm
watching onrushing, inevitable disaster.
I too have felt sweat (or ecstatic tears) plaster
damp hair to my eyes, as a slug’s dense film
becomes mucous-insulate. Always, thereafter
living in darkness, bright things overwhelm.
I wrote “Modern Charon” after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. In addition to being an anti-war poet and writer, translator, editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry, I am also a longtime peace activist and author of a peace plan for Israel/Palestine, the Burch-Elberry Peace Initiative, which you can read in a few minutes by clicking or tapping the hyperlinked title. Is it worth a few minutes of your time? I will quote John Lennon: “All we are saying is “Give peace a chance.”
Survivors
by Michael R. Burch
In truth, we do not feel the horror
of the survivors,
but what passes for horror:
a shiver of “empathy.”
We too are “survivors,”
if to survive is to snap back
from the sight of death
like a turtle retracting its neck.
Published by Gostinaya (Russia), Ulita (Russia), Promosaik (Germany), The Night Genre Project and Muddy Chevy; also turned into a YouTube video by Lillian Y. Wong.
Child of 9-11
by Michael R. Burch
a poem for Christina-Taylor Green, who was born
on September 11, 2001 and died at the age of nine,
shot to death ...
Child of 9-11, beloved,
I bring this lily, lay it down
here at your feet, and eiderdown,
and all soft things, for your gentle spirit.
I bring this psalm — I hope you hear it.
Much love I bring — I lay it down
here by your form, which is not you,
but what you left this shell-shocked world
to help us learn what we must do
to save another child like you.
Child of 9-11, I know
you are not here, but watch, afar
from distant stars, where angels rue
the vicious things some mortals do.
I also watch; I also rue.
And so I make this pledge and vow:
though I may weep, I will not rest
nor will my pen fail heaven's test
till guns and wars and hate are banned
from every shore, from every land.
Child of 9-11, I grieve
your tender life, cut short ... bereaved,
what can I do, but pledge my life
to saving lives like yours? Belief
in your sweet worth has led me here ...
I give my all: my pen, this tear,
this lily and this eiderdown,
and all soft things my heart can bear;
I bear them to your final bier,
and leave them with my promise, here.
Veiled
by Michael R. Burch
She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us . . .
tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief . . .
ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered . . .
and if you were to ask her,
she might say—
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,
and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.
American Eagle, Grounded
by Michael R. Burch
Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.
Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged thrust,
juts.
Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.
Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.
US Verse, after Auden
by Michael R. Burch
“Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”
Verse has small value in our Unisphere,
nor is it fit for windy revelation.
It cannot legislate less taxing fears;
it cannot make us, several, a nation.
Enumerator of our sins and dreams,
it pens its cryptic numbers, and it sings,
a little quaintly, of the ways of love.
(It seems of little use for lesser things.)
The Unisphere mentioned is a large stainless steel representation of the earth; it was commissioned to celebrate the beginning of the space age for the 1964 New York World's Fair.
To Have Loved
by Michael R. Burch
"The face that launched a thousand ships ..."
Helen, bright accompaniment,
accouterment of war as sure as all
the polished swords of princes groomed to lie
in mausoleums all eternity ...
The price of love is not so high
as never to have loved once in the dark
beyond foreseeing. Now, as dawn gleams pale
upon small wind-fanned waves, amid white sails, ...
now all that war entails becomes as small,
as though receding. Paris in your arms
was never yours, nor were you his at all.
And should gods call
in numberless strange voices, should you hear,
still what would be the difference? Men must die
to be remembered. Fame, the shrillest cry,
leaves all the world dismembered.
Hold him, lie,
tell many pleasant tales of lips and thighs;
enthrall him with your sweetness, till the pall
and ash lie cold upon him.
Is this all? You saw fear in his eyes, and now they dim
with fear’s remembrance. Love, the fiercest cry,
becomes gasped sighs in his once-gallant hymn
of dreamed “salvation.” Still, you do not care
because you have this moment, and no man
can touch you as he can ... and when he’s gone
there will be other men to look upon
your beauty, and have done.
Smile—woebegone, pale, haggard. Will the tales
paint this—your final portrait? Can the stars
find any strange alignments, Zodiacs,
to spell, or unspell, what held beauty lacks?
No One
by Michael R. Burch
No One hears the bells tonight;
they tell him something isn’t right.
But No One is not one to rush;
he smiles from beds soft, green and lush
as far away a startled thrush
escapes horned owls in sinking flight.
No One hears the cannon’s roar
and muses that its voice means war
comes knocking on men’s doors tonight.
He sleeps outside in awed delight
beneath the enigmatic stars
and shivers in their cooling light.
No One knows the world will end,
that he’ll be lonely, without friend
or foe to conquer. All will be
once more, celestial harmony.
He’ll miss men’s voices, now and then,
but worlds can be remade again.
The English are very hospitable,
but tea-less, alas, they grow pitiable ...
or pitiless, rather,
and quite in a lather!
O bother, they're more than formidable.
—"Of Tetley’s and V-2's," or, "Why Not to Bomb the Brits" by Michael R. Burch
War, the God
by Michael R. Burch
War lifts His massive head and turns ...
The world upon its axis spins.
... His head held low from weight of horns,
His hackles high. The sun He scorns
and seeks the rose not, but its thorns.
The sun must set, as night begins,
while, unrepentant of our sins,
we play His game, until He wins.
For War, our God, our bellicose Mars
still dominates our heavens, determines our Stars.
“Stars” in the sense of both our fates and our heroes. I usually avoid archaic language but it seemed appropriate here.
Completing the Pattern
by Michael R. Burch
Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead
who kept life’s compact
and who thus endure
harsh sentence here—among pink-petaled beds
and manicured green lawns.
The sky’s azure,
pale blue once like their eyes, will gleam blood-red
at last when sunset staggers to the door
of each white mausoleum, to inquire—
What use, O things of erstwhile loveliness?
Recursion
by Michael R. Burch
In a dream I saw boys lying
under banners gaily flying
and I heard their mothers sighing
from some dark distant shore.
For I saw their sons essaying
into fields―gleeful, braying―
their bright armaments displaying;
such manly oaths they swore!
From their playfields, boys returning
full of honor’s white-hot burning
and desire’s restless yearning
sired new kids for the corps.
In a dream I saw boys dying
under banners gaily lying
and I heard their mothers crying
from some dark distant shore.War
by Michael R. Burchlysander lies in lauded greece
and sleeps and dreams, a stone for a pillow,
unseeing as sunset devours limp willows,
but War glares on.and joab's sightless gaze is turned
beyond the jordan's ravaged shore;
his war-ax lies to be taxed no more,
but War hacks on.and roland sleeps in poppied fields
with flowers flowing at his feet;
their fragrance lulls his soul to sleep,
but War raves on.and patton sighs an unheard sigh
for sorties past and those to come;
he does not heed the battle drum,
but War rolls on.for now new heroes grab up guns
and rush to fight their fathers' wars,
as warriors' children must, of course,
while War laughs on.I believe I wrote the first version of this poem around age 17. I was never fully happy with the poem, although I liked some of the lines and revised it 46 years later.
An Ecstasy of Fumbling
by Michael R. BurchThe poets believe
everything resolves to metaphor—
a distillation,
a vapor
beyond filtration,
though perhaps not quite as volatile as before.The poets conceive
of death in the trenches
as the price of art,
not war,
fumbling with their masque-like
dissertations
to describe the Hollywood-like goreas something beyond belief,
abstracting concrete bunkers to Achaemenid bas-relief.
What the Poet Sees
by Michael R. Burch
What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer underwater,
watching the shoreline blur,
sees through his breath's weightless bubbles:
both worlds grow obscure.
Auschwitz Rose
by Michael R. Burch
There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar,
a rose like Sharon's, lovely as her name.
The world forgot her, and is not the same.
I still love her and enlist this sacred fire
to keep her memory's exalted flame
unmolested by the thistles and the nettles.
On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles;
they sleep alike—diminutive and tall,
the innocent, the "surgeons."
Sleeping, all.
Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals,
if accidents of coloration, gall
my heart no less.
Amid thick weeds and muck
there lies a rose man's crackling lightning struck:
the only Rose I ever longed to pluck.
Soon I'll bed there and bid the world "Good Luck."
Cleansings
by Michael R. Burch
Walk here among the walking specters. Learn
inhuman patience. Flesh can only cleave
to bone this tightly if their hearts believe
that God is good, and never mind the Urn.
A lentil and a bean might plump their skin
with mothers’ bounteous, soft-dimpled fat
(and call it “health”), might quickly build again
the muscles of dead menfolk. Dream, like that,
and call it courage. Cry, and be deceived,
and so endure. Or burn, made wholly pure.
If one prayer is answered,
“G-d” must be believed.
No holy pyre this—death’s hissing chamber.
Two thousand years ago—a starlit manger,
weird Herod’s cries for vengeance on the meek,
the children slaughtered. Fear, when angels speak,
the prophesies of man.
Do what you "can,"
not what you must, or should.
They call you “good,”
dead eyes devoid of tears; how shall they speak
except in blankness? Fear, then, how they weep.
Escape the gentle clutching stickfolk. Creep
away in shame to retch and flush away
your vomit from their ashes. Learn to pray.
Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch
by Michael R. Burch
for the Religious Right
Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh
went to the ovens. Please don’t bother to cry.
You could have saved her, but you were all tied up
complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp.
Scratch that. You were born after World War II.
You had something more important to do:
while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza
with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a
religious tract against homosexual marriage
and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)
Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure!
After all, your intentions were ineluctably pure.
And what the hell does THE LORD care about palestinians?
Certainly, Christians were correct about negroes and indians.
Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.
The original closing stanza:
Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure
that your intentions were good and ineluctably pure.
After all, what the hell does he care about Palestinians?
Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians.
Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.
Excerpts from “Travels with Einstein”
by Michael R. Burch
for Trump
I went to Berlin to learn wisdom
from Adolph. The wild spittle flew
as he screamed at me, with great conviction:
“Please despise me! I look like a Jew!”
So I flew off to ’Nam to learn wisdom
from tall Yankees who cursed “yellow” foes.
“If we lose this small square,” they informed me,
earth’s nations will fall, dominoes!”
I then sat at Christ’s feet to learn wisdom,
but his Book, from its genesis to close,
said: “Men can enslave their own brothers!”
(I soon noticed he lacked any clothes.)
So I traveled to bright Tel Aviv
where great scholars with lofty IQs
informed me that (since I’m an Arab)
I’m unfit to lick dirt from their shoes.
At last, done with learning, I stumbled
to a well where the waters seemed sweet:
the mirage of American “justice.”
There I wept a real sea, in defeat.
Epitaph for a Palestinian Child
by Michael R. Burch
I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide.
who, US?
by Michael R. Burch
jesus was born
a palestinian child
where there’s no Room
for the meek and the mild
... and in bethlehem still
to this day, lambs are born
to cries of “no Room!”
and Puritanical scorn ...
under Herod, Trump, Bibi
their fates are the same —
the slouching Beast mauls them
and WE have no shame:
“who’s to blame?”
Frail Envelope of Flesh
by Michael R. Burch
for the mothers and children of the Holocaust and Gaza
Frail envelope of flesh,
lying cold on the surgeon’s table
with anguished eyes
like your mother’s eyes
and a heartbeat weak, unstable ...
Frail crucible of dust,
brief flower come to this—
your tiny hand
in your mother’s hand
for a last bewildered kiss ...
Brief mayfly of a child,
to live two artless years!
Now your mother’s lips
seal up your lips
from the Deluge of her tears ...
I read the phrase "Frail envelope of flesh!" in a comic book as a boy and never forgot it. Eventually, it occurred to me to write a poem with that title and theme. I wrote the poem circa 1978 around age 20.
First They Came for the Muslims
by Michael R. Burch
after Martin Niemöller
First they came for the Muslims
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Muslim.
Then they came for the homosexuals
and I did not speak out
because I was not a homosexual.
Then they came for the feminists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a feminist.
Now when will they come for me
because I was too busy and too apathetic
to defend my sisters and brothers?
"First They Came for the Muslims" has been adopted by Amnesty International for its Words That Burn anthology, a free online resource for students and educators. According to Google the poem once appeared on a staggering 823K web pages. That's a lot of cutting and pasting! It is indeed an honor to have one of my poems published by such an outstanding organization as Amnesty International, one of the world's finest. Not only is the cause good―a stated goal is to teach students about human rights through poetry―but so far the poetry published seems quite good to me. My poem appears beneath the famous Holocaust poem that inspired it, "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller. Here's a bit of background information: Words That Burn is an online poetry anthology and human rights educational resource for students and teachers created by Amnesty International in partnership with The Poetry Hour. Amnesty International is the world’s largest human rights organization, with seven million supporters. Its new webpage has been designed to "enable young people to explore human rights through poetry whilst developing their voice and skills as poets." This exemplary resource was inspired by the poetry anthology Words that Burn, curated by Josephine Hart of The Poetry Hour, which in turn was inspired by Thomas Gray's observation that "Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn."
My nightmare ...
by Michael R. Burch writing as The Child Poets of Gaza
I had a dream of Jesus!
Mama, his eyes were so kind!
But behind him I saw a billion Christians
hissing "You're nothing!," so blind.
I, too, have a dream ...
by Michael R. Burch writing as The Child Poets of Gaza
I, too, have a dream ...
that one day Jews and Christians
will see me as I am:
a small child, lonely and afraid,
staring down the barrels of their big bazookas,
knowing I did nothing
to deserve such hatred.
Suffer the Little Children
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
I saw the carnage . . . saw girls' dreaming heads
blown to red atoms, and their dreams with them . . .
saw babies liquefied in burning beds
as, horrified, I heard their murderers’ phlegm . . .
I saw my mother stitch my shroud’s black hem,
for in that moment I was one of them . . .
I saw our Father’s eyes grow hard and bleak
to see frail roses severed at the stem . . .
How could I fail to speak?
Lockheed, Take Heed
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
Terror fell upon my children. Wailing,
they ran toward my arms—small, pale with fright.
They seemed eternities from me . . . so distant!
Their day exploded. Now I live in night.
"Made in America." I find that tragic.
Though far less tragic than my sweet doves, blown
to atoms by your profits’ ill-bought magic.
Land of the "brave," the "free"? Brave freedom’s flown
to heights unknown—too high to see my people
crushed in the dust by those you "love" so well.
Sing hymns. Praise God. Erect some higher steeple.
Condemn my kind to poverty, and hell.
"Shock and awe?" Yes, I feel awe—and shock.
You jackals killed my doves, my lambs, my flock!
Apollyon I — Night of the Apocalypse
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
His eyes meet mine with blank incomprehension.
How did you come, my friend, to harm this child?
"She was not mine, and no report’s been filed.
So what, old chum?" (Strange lines beyond my scansion.)
A girl so sweet, if woebegone?
Why, surely she was everyone’s!
He lifts his eyes, shifts, sighs, spits, unbeguiled.
He does not know that I have come to judge him.
"What’s it to you?" he threatens, with a leer.
She was my child . . .
"That thing defiled?"
Ten trillion wavering stars blink, disappear.
Her Slender Arm
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
Her slender arm, her slender arm,
I see it reaching out to me!—
wan, vulnerable, without a charm
or amulet to guard it. Flee!
I scream at her in wild distress.
She chides me with defiant eyes.
Where shall I go? They scream, "Confess!
Confess yourself, your children lice,
your husband mantis, all your kind
unfit to live!"
See, or be blind.
I cannot see beyond the gloom
that shrouds her in their terrible dungeon.
I only see the nightmare room,
the implements of torture.
Sudden
shocks contort her slender frame!
She screams, I scream, we scream in pain!
I sense the shadow-men, insane,
who gibber, drooling, Why are you
not just like US, the Chosen Few?
Suddenly, she stares through me
and suddenly I understand:
I hear the awful litany
of names I voted for. My hand
lies firmly on the implement
they plan to use, next, on her children
who huddle in the corner. Bent,
their bidden pawn, I heil Amen!
to their least wish. I hone the blade
"Made in America," their slave.
She has no words, but only tears.
I turn and retch. I vomit bile.
I hear the shadow men’s cruel jeers.
I sense, I feel their knowing smiles.
I paid for this. I built this place.
The little that she had, they took
at my expense. Now they erase
her family from life’s tattered book.
I cannot meet her eyes again.
I stand one with the shadow men.
The Least of These
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
Here lies a child of the Holocaust.
And here lie her dreams: lost, buried, unknown . . .
lie buried, unlived. And who knows their cost?
No roses grace this stone, stark as cold bone.
"Dearly Beloved," her white marker reads,
as many bright sermons on Love have begun,
but this is her end. She lies among weeds
more somber than widows’, six feet from the sun.
Whom shall we cherish? Friends, whom shall we love?
The war profiteer, or the peaceable dove?
"Made in America," her Cruise Line said:
now Palestine’s dove lies here—cold, shattered, dead.
Here lie her pieces. Friend, read them, and weep.
Stand firmly for justice, or lie, in your sleep.
The Horror
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
the Horror is a child who died because
we closed our eyes to tribal Nature’s laws,
who knows no justice, but red fangs and claws.
the Horror is the child we led to stray
into dark wilds where evil Men hold sway,
abandoned her, then swiftly walked away.
now she lies dead, and many innocents!
the Tyger prowls; He longs to kill; He pants
for blood, as children die, unheard, like ants.
the Tyger rules by Law: red Claw and Tooth,
while Barnums laugh, count Beans, and sip Vermouth.
In her dread repose (I)
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
Find in her pallid, dread repose—
no hope, alas!, for the Rose.
In her dread repose (II)
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
Find in her pallid, dread repose—
no hope for the World. O, my violated Rose!
Lines for a Palestinian Mother and Child
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
I swear her eyes were gentle . . . that she was
a child herself, although she bore a child
close to her breast: her one and only cause.
I watched in apprehension as men filed
in close, goose-stepping ranks on either side,
as if they longed for blood, on Eastertide.
I thought of women slain for being born
the "wrong" race, sex, caste, or the "wrong" religion.
I thought of Joan of Arc, her tunic torn,
her breasts exposed, her bloody Inquisition.
I felt the flames and then her screams explode.
I thought of Mary and her dolorous road.
When will religion learn men must repent
of killing even one mild innocent—
whether before or after Lent?
US Schoolboys
by Nakba, a pseudonym of Michael R. Burch
The simple path to peace
begins with a single step,
as the sun breaks bright to the East
though the schoolboy has long overslept.
O, when will he rise and yawn!
Will he miss how dew spangles the lawn?
The simple path to peace begins
when the schoolboy repents of his childish sins,
for his balmy vacation’s long over.
There’s no time to be lolling in clover!
Now that the bright day has begun,
he must rise in accord with the sun.
The path is called Justice . . . and now
he must walk it, and stoutly avow
to follow wherever it leads
till the sun sets its blaze to the weeds . . .
He must thresh, so his brothers can find
peace’s path, though the world seems blind.
Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch
I held the switch in trembling fingers, asked
why existence felt so small, so purposeless,
like a minnow wriggling feebly in my grasp ...
vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms
as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch
to OFF ... I heard the klaxon-shrill alarms
like vultures’ shriekings ... earthward, in a stall ...
we floated ... earthward ... wings outstretched, aghast
like Icarus ... as through the void we fell ...
till nothing was so beautiful, so blue ...
so vivid as that moment ... and I held
an image of your face, and dreamed I flew
into your arms. The earth rushed up. I knew
such comfort, in that moment, loving you.
Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch
for Beth
She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget,"
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.
She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget,"
and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.
Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on,
she stitches in wet linen: "NEVER FORGET,"
and listens to her heart's emphatic song.
The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.
She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.
This is a true poem about what my wife Beth did on the first anniversary of 9-11. This is the sort of unabashedly sentimental poem that no self-respecting "major journal" would publish ... but then what do any of them know about poetry, much less human hearts? I love this villanelle because it captures Beth in all her fury and all her love. It may not be a great poem, but I think readers will grok Beth, so hopefully the poem accomplishes its purpose.
911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch
“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats
They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”
They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,
far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot . . .
Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.
Mending
by Michael R. BurchI am besieged with kindnesses;
sometimes I laugh,
delighted for a moment,
then resume
the more seemly occupation of my craft.I do not taste the candies…
The perfume
of roses is uplifted
in a draft
that vanishes into the ceiling’s fanswhich spin like old propellers
till the room
is full of ghostly bits of yarn ...My task
is not to knit,but not to end too soon.
This is a poem for the survivors of 9–11 whose families lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks.
Salve
by Michael R. Burch
for the victims and survivors of 9-11
The world is unsalvageable ...
but as we lie here
in bed
stricken to the heart by love
despite war’s
flickering images,
sometimes we still touch,
laughing, amazed,
that our flesh
does not despair
of love
as we do,
that our bodies are wise
in ways we refuse
to comprehend,
still insisting we eat,
drink ...
even multiply.
And so we touch ...
touch, and only imagine
ourselves immune:
two among billions
in this night of wished-on stars,
caresses,
kisses,
and condolences.
We are not lovers of irony,
we
who imagine ourselves
beyond the redemption
of tears
because we have salvaged
so few
for ourselves ...
and so we laugh
at our predicament,
fumbling for the ointment.
They Take Their Shape
by Michael R. Burch“We will not forget moments of silence and days of mourning ...”—George W. Bush
We will not forget ...
the moments of silence and the days of mourning,
the bells that swung from leaden-shadowed vents
to copper bursts above “hush!”-chastened children
who saw the sun break free (abandonment
to run and laugh forsaken for the moment),
still flashing grins they could not quite repent ...
Nor should they—anguish triumphs just an instant;
this every child accepts; the nymphet weaves;
transformed, the grotesque adult-thing emerges:
damp-winged, huge-eyed, to find the sun deceives ...
But children know; they spin limpwinged in darkness
cocooned in hope—the shriveled chrysalis
that paralyzes time. Suspended, dreaming,
they do not fall, but grow toward what is,
then grope about to find which transformation
might best endure the light or dark. “Survive”
becomes the whispered mantra of a pupa’s
awakening ... till What takes shape and flies
shrieks, parroting Our own shrill, restive cries.
Brother Iran
by Michael R. Burchfor the poets of Iran
Brother Iran, I feel your pain.
I feel it as when the Turk fled Spain.
As the Jew fled, too, that constricting span,
I feel your pain, Brother Iran.Brother Iran, I know you are noble!
I too fear Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
But though my heart shudders, I have a plan,
and I know you are noble, Brother Iran.Brother Iran, I salute your Poets!
your Mathematicians!, all your great Wits!
O, come join the earth's great Caravan.
We'll include your Poets, Brother Iran.Brother Iran, I love your Verse!
Come take my hand now, let's rehearse
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
For I love your Verse, Brother Iran.Bother Iran, civilization's Flower!
How high flew your spires in man's early hours!
Let us build them yet higher, for that's my plan,
civilization's first flower, Brother Iran.
Nucleotidings
by Michael R. Burch“We will walk taller!” said Gupta,
sorta abrupta,
hand-in-hand with his mom,
eyeing the A-bomb.“Who needs a mahatma
in the aftermath of NAFTA?
Now, that was a disaster,”
cried glib Punjab.“After Y2k,
time will spin out of control anyway,”
flamed Vijay.“My family is relatively heavy,
too big even for a pig-barn Chevy;
we need more space,”
spat What’s His Face.“What does it matter,
dirge or mantra,”
sighed Serge.“The world will wobble
in Hubble’s lens
till the tempest ends,”
wailed Mercedes.“The world is going to hell in a bucket.
So fuck it and get outta my face!
We own this place!
Me and my friends got more guns than ISIS,
so what’s the crisis?”
cried Bubba Billy Joe Bob Puckett.
Trade Wars
by Michael R. Burch
Have no patience with pacifists
erecting their palatial liberties
out of the bone heaps of patriots,
calling their mothers “whores,”
their fathers “mongers.”
War is a trade
and here lie the many taxed
beyond endurance, who endured
only long enough to pay
the commutations of our freedom.
Heed their voices:
evil is not a vice
but a commerce,
an industry
daily employing the mechanisms of destruction.
And if we do not understand
the economies of hate,
the bull market in salvage,
or the inflation of the price
of the redemption of freedom,
it is enough to know that blood has its price:
most expensive when watered.
We should all be pacifists by preferring peace to war, but some wars are necessary, such as combating fascism during World War II. We should not insult those who risk their lives on our behalf, but we must pressure our governments to only wage war as the very last resort. And then with the goal of a just peace.
Lay Down Your Arms
by Michael R. BurchLay down your arms; come, sleep in the sand.
The battle is over and night is at hand.
Our voyage has ended; there's nowhere to go . . .
the earth is a cinder still faintly aglow.Lay down your pamphlets; let's bicker no more.
Instead, let us sleep here on this ravaged shore.
The sea is still boiling; the air is wan, thin . . .
lay down your pamphlets; now no one will “win.”Lay down your hymnals; abandon all song.
If God was to save us, He waited too long.
A new world emerges, but this world is through . . .
so lay down your hymnals, or write something new.I wrote “Lay Down Your Arms” around age 20, as a college student. It was one of my first acceptances by a literary journal, The Romantist. But I never received a copy, so I can’t be sure that it was actually published, drat!
I, Too, Sang America (in my Diapers!)
by Michael R. Burch
I, too, served my country,
first as a tyke, then as a toddler, later as a rambunctious boy,
growing up on military bases around the world,
making friends only to leave them,
saluting the flag through veils of tears,
time and time again ...
In defense of my country,
I too did my awesome duty —
cursing the Communists,
confronting Them in backyard battles where They slunk around disguised as my sniggling Sisters,
while always demonstrating the immense courage
to start my small life over and over again
whenever Uncle Sam called ...
Building and rebuilding my shattered psyche,
such as it was,
dealing with PTSD (preschool traumatic stress disorder)
without the adornments of medals, ribbons or epaulets,
serving without pay,
following my father’s gruffly barked orders,
however ill-advised ...
A true warrior!
Will you salute me?
I hope my “small” attempt at humor will help readers remember the sacrifices made by the spouses, children and extended families of our valiant servicemen and women. It was not easy making friends only to lose them, time and time again, as I grew up a “military brat” on American air bases around the globe. I really did make sacrifices for my country, while winning every battle against the “communists” in our backyard.
I Pray Tonight
by Michael R. Burch
I pray tonight
the starry Light
might
surround you.
I pray
by day
that, come what may,
no dark thing confound you.
I pray ere the morrow
an end to your sorrow.
May angels' white chorales
sing, and astound you.
I think Whitman's poem, The Wound Dresser, should be on your list.
I appreciate all the history you provided, the whole nine yards, are priceless, and the beauty of it, Michael, you’ve catalogued this valuable history in your “space” and I can access knowledge and poetry at any time, because you don’t sleep. Boom.