Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique. |
Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air, Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts, Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same. |
The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud? |
The doctor punched my vein,The captain called me Cain, Upon my belly sat the sow of fear. |
The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race. |
There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war. Cervantes Every war has its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades. |
To girls and wives always alive and fated; To men and scholars always dead like Greek And always mistranslated. |
To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other. |
We are deranged, walking among the cops, Who sweep glass and are large and composed. |
We ask for no statistics of the killed, For nothing political impinges on This single casualty, or all those gone, Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed, Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost. |
We too are ashes as we watch and hear The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise, Of one whose promised thoughts of other days, Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed, The service record of his youth wiped out, His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear. |