poetry about war

[quasimodo1]

PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHT LAWS: READ THIS BEFORE POSTING:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17515

..

..



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 gas-shells dropping softly 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.*
.................................................. .................................................. .....

*From the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”


{said to be the most famous poem about WWI}....further note on Latin translation.................... DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country

[quasimodo1]

THE WAR IN THE AIR



For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.


Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,


Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.
.................................................. .................................................. ....{exceprt from contemporary poet Howard Nemerov}

[lavendar1]

An interesting thread. Here's a particular favorite of mine that fits:


"The Man He Killed" -- Thomas Hardy


Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

[NikolaiI]

The Recruit - A.E. Housman

LEAVE your home behind, lad,
And reach your friends your hand,
And go, and luck go with you
While Ludlow tower shall stand.

Oh, come you home of Sunday 5
When Ludlow streets are still
And Ludlow bells are calling
To farm and lane and mill,

Or come you home of Monday
When Ludlow market hums 10
And Ludlow chimes are playing
‘The conquering hero comes,’

Come you home a hero,
Or come not home at all,
The lads you leave will mind you 15
Till Ludlow tower shall fall.

And you will list the bugle
That blows in lands of morn,
And make the foes of England
Be sorry you were born. 20

And you till trump of doomsday
On lands of morn may lie,
And make the hearts of comrades
Be heavy where you die.

Leave your home behind you, 25
Your friends by field and town:
Oh, town and field will mind you
Till Ludlow tower is down.

[quasimodo1]

The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas (July, 1861)
by Herman Melville


Did all the lets and bars appear
To every just or larger end,
Whence should come the trust and cheer?
Youth must its ignorant impulse lend—
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,
The champions and enthusiasts of the state:
Turbid ardors and vain joys
Not barrenly abate—
Stimulants to the power mature,
Preparatives of fate.


Who here forecasteth the event?
What heart but spurns at precedent
And warnings of the wise,
Contemned foreclosures of surprise?
The banners play, the bugles call,
The air is blue and prodigal.
No berrying party, pleasure-wooed,
No picnic party in the May,
Ever went less loth than they
Into that leafy neighborhood.
In Bacchic glee they file toward Fate,
Moloch’s uninitiate;
Expectancy, and glad surmise
Of battle’s unknown mysteries.


All they feel is this: ’tis glory,
A rapture sharp, though transitory,
Yet lasting in belaureled story.
So they gayly go to fight,
Chatting left and laughing right.


But some who this blithe mood present,
As on in lightsome files they fare,
Shall die experienced ere three days be spent—
Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare;
Or shame survive, and, like to adamant,
Thy after shock, Manassas, share.

[NikolaiI]

1887 - A.E. Housman

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.

Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because 'tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.

Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we'll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home tonight:
Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.

'God save the Queen' we living sing,
From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not;
Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.

[Mrs. Dalloway]

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Edward Thomas

[quasimodo1]

LOOKING INTO HISTORY



I.


Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye
Stand in a land subdued beyond belief.
Belief might lend them life again. I try
Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief


To see my spellbound fathers in these men
Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere,
Show but the postures men affected then
And the hermit faces of a finished year.


The guns and gear and all are strange until
Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees
Verging a road that struggles up a hill.
They’re sycamores.
The long-abated breeze


Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound
Of guns and a great forest in distress.
Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound
Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.



II.


But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think
How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees
Rode on the back of Simois to sink
In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s


Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls
Its salvage of the world in shifty waves,
Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls
And yielding views of its confounded graves


To the new moon, the sun, or any eye
That in its shallow shoreward version sees
The pebbles charging with a deathless cry
And carageen memorials of trees.
{Two parts of this poem by Richard Wilbur}

[quasimodo1]

THE SEARCHLIGHTS
[Political morality differs from individual morality, because there is no power above the State. -- General von Bernardi.]

Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight,
The lean black cruisers search the sea.
Night-long their level shafts of light
Revolve,and find no enemy.
Only they know each leaping wave
May hide the lightning, and their grave.

And in the land they guard so well
Is there no silent watch to keep?
An age is dying and the bell
Rings midnight on a vaster deep.
But over all its waves, once more
The searchlights move, from shore to shore.

And captains that we thought were dead,
And dreamers that we thought were dumb,
And voices that we thought were fled,
Arise, and call us, and we come;
And "Search in thine own soul," they cry;
"For there, too, lurks thine enemy."

Search for the foe in thine own soul,
The sloth, the intellectual pride;
The trivial jest that veils the goal
For which our father lived and died;
The lawless dreams, the cynic Art,
That rend thy nobler self apart.

Not far, not far into the night,
These level swords of light can pierce;
Yet for her faith does England fight,
Her faith in this our universe,
Believing Truth and Justice draw
From founts of everlasting law;



{excerpt from this poem by Alfred Noyes}

[ahsiam]

Its from bangladesh......

MY BROTHER
Humayun kabir

In every shiny movement of the stengun, he played
the music of brightness. He threw a grenade, and
pierced
the enemy by a merciless bayonet.
My own brother, whose passion was
freedom ; he ignored the mother's warning,
disobeyed the father ; his heart the beach of a sea,
and
the beckon call of a golden dream, he forgot his
sophisticated pain, and,
with a flag of blood in hand, went out to save his
land.
He, my adolescent brother, was in love with freedom;
used to be moved
too much by slogans. A proud wind came, and
called him
out of his house. And then, the music of the stengun.
An efficient bullet from the opposing guns
has hit him. Did his corpse look like a
severed white lily ? I do not know
what kind of a grass would grow all around him.

In my memory is his tomb : I place my floral wreath.
I save my tears. That smiling face
will not call me a brother, nor will assure me
of truth in man and of a bright future.
Will he be happy ? Does a second life
begin after the body has died ? If so,
let the land of Bengal be happy, happy will be the
martyr adolescent.

Translated by Munzur-I-Mowla

[quasimodo1]

COACHING WINTER TRACK IN TIME OF WAR

The boys are running “suicides”
on the football field today:
ten-yard increments out to the fifty
and back again, push-ups in between.
It’s thirty degrees, but they sweat
like it’s summer in Baghdad,
curse like soldiers, swear to God
they’ll see you burn in Hell.

You could fall in love with boys
like these: so earnest, so eager, so
ready to do whatever you ask,
full of themselves and the world.

How do you tell them it’s not that simple?
How do you tell them: question it all?
Question everything. Even a coach.
Even a president. .......... {excerpt from this poem by contemporary poet W.D.Ehrhart}

[quasimodo1]

ONE OF THE LIVES



If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child......


{recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize, excerpt from poem by W.S.Merwin}

[quasimodo1]

from The Aeneid ["A grove stood in the city"]

Translated by Edward Fairfax Taylor


A grove stood in the city, rich in shade,
Where storm-tost Tyrians, past the perilous brine,
Dug from the ground, by royal Juno's aid,
A war-steed's head, to far-off days a sign
That wealth and prowess should adorn the line.
Here, by the goddess and her gifts renowned,
Sidonian Dido built a stately shrine.
All brazen rose the threshold; brass was round
The door-posts; brazen doors on grating hinges sound.

Here a new sight Aeneas' hopes upraised,
And fear was softened, and his heart was mann'd.
For while, the queen awaiting, round he gazed,
And marvelled at the happy town, and scanned
The rival labours of each craftsman's hand,
Behold, Troy's battles on the walls appear,
The war, since noised through many a distant land,
There Priam and th' Atridae twain, and here
Achilles, fierce to both, still ruthless and severe.

Pensive he stood, and with a rising tear,
"What lands, Achates, on the earth, but know
Our labours? See our Priam! Even here
Worth wins her due, and there are tears to flow,
And human hearts to feel for human woe.
Fear not," he cries, "Troy's glory yet shall gain
Some safety." Thus upon the empty show
He feeds his soul, while ever and again
Deeply he sighs, and tears run down his cheeks like rain.

He sees, how, fighting round the Trojan wall,
Here fled the Greeks, the Trojan youth pursue,
Here fled the Phrygians, and, with helmet tall,
Achilles in his chariot stormed and slew.
Not far, with tears, the snowy tents he knew
Of Rhesus, where Tydides, bathed in blood,
Broke in at midnight with his murderous crew,
And drove the hot steeds campward, ere the food
Of Trojan plains they browsed, or drank the Xanthian flood.

There, reft of arms, poor Troilus, rash to dare
Achilles, by his horses dragged amain,
Hangs from his empty chariot. Neck and hair
Trail on the ground; his hand still grasps the rein;
The spear inverted scores the dusty plain.
Meanwhile, with beaten breasts and streaming hair,
The Trojan dames, a sad and suppliant train,
The veil to partial Pallas' temple bear.
Stern, with averted eyes the Goddess spurns their prayer.

Thrice had Achilles round the Trojan wall
Dragged Hector; there the slayer sells the slain.
Sighing he sees him, chariot, arms and all,
And Priam, spreading helpless hands in vain.
Himself he knows among the Greeks again,
Black Memnon's arms, and all his Eastern clan,
Penthesilea's Amazonian train
With moony shields. Bare-breasted, in the van,
Girt with a golden zone, the maiden fights with man.




From Book One of The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Edward Fairfax Taylor. First published by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1907. ..........http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18466

[quasimodo1]

FOREIGN WAR





Sundays in Germany everyone



walked. It was common to see



amputees. In the little Chapel



in the park was a list of wartime



dead: they took their soldiers



young, I said, fourteen, fifteen,



thirteen, this is a baby, this a woman



of seventy, civilian dead; we



do not see them on our walls,



no war on our shores, even the walking



wounded are few and far between,



the man with the hook at the fishing



tackle store, quite useful to me,



the full VA hospital in every city.............






Kelley White
KELLEY WHITE was born and raised in New Hampshire and has degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School. She has been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years. She has had over 250 poems published by more than one hundred journals, including American Writing, The Café Review, Feminist Studies, and most recently, Whiskey Island Magazine and Rattle. A book of my "medical" poems, The Patient Presents, has been published by The People's Press in Baltimore, and a chapbook of very different material, "I am going to walk toward the sanctuary," will be published this summer by Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. Kelley received a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece from Gravity Presses in 2000, her first year of submission.
{excerpt from "Foreign War" by contemporary poet Kelley White, as presented with biographical comment in the Adirondack Review}