Poems About Dictators

I’ve been collecting poems (current and historical) about political mistakes, dictators and the experience of dictatorships including fascism. No reason.

Updated: 14 March 2023

 

Parsley
by Rita Dove

1. The Cane Fields

There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears

to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—
out of the swamp, the cane appears

and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.

El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.
And we lie down. For every drop of blood
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.

2. The Palace

The word the general’s chosen is parsley.
It is fall, when thoughts turn
to love and death; the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
four-star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders
Who can I kill today. And for a moment
the little knot of screams
is still. The parrot, who has traveled

all the way from Australia in an ivory
cage, is, coy as a widow, practising
spring. Ever since the morning
his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull-shaped candies
for the Day of the Dead, the general
has hated sweets. He orders pastries
brought up for the bird; they arrive

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;
he sees his boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—
how stupid he looked!— at the sound
of artillery. I never thought it would sing
the soldier said, and died. Now

the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by rain and streaming.
He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians sing without R’s
as they swing the great machetes:
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows
his mother was no stupid woman; she
could roll an R like a queen. Even
a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother’s, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word.

 

August 22, 1939
by Kenneth Rexroth

“. . . when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wildflowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the tranquillity of the mother-nature, and I am sure she will enjoy this very much, as you surely will be happy for it. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim; because they are your friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday, for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”

—Nicola Sacco to his son Dante, Aug. 18, 1927.
Angst und Gestalt und Gebet —Rilke

What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Twenty years at hard labor,
Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante,
Indian chants and gestalt psychology;
What words can it spell,
This alphabet of one sensibility?
The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression,
The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits,
Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality,
The fire of poppies in eroded fields,
The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest,
The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought,
Life streaming ungovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
The centuries have changed little in this art,
The subjects are still the same.
“For Christ’s sake take off your clothes and get into bed,
We are not going to live forever.”
“Petals fall from the rose,”
We fall from life,
Values fall from history like men from shellfire,
Only a minimum survives,
Only an unknown achievement.
They can put it all on the headstones,
In all the battlefields,
“Poor guy, he never knew what it was all about.”
Spectacled men will come with shovels in a thousand years,
Give lectures in universities on cultural advances, cultural lags.
A little more garlic in the soup,
A half-hour more in bed in the morning,
Some of them got it, some of them didn’t;
The things they dropped in their hurry
Are behind the glass cases of dusky museums.
This year we made four major ascents,
Camped for two weeks at timberline,
Watched Mars swim close to the earth,
Watched the black aurora of war
Spread over the sky of a decayed civilization.
These are the last terrible years of authority.
The disease has reached its crisis,
Ten thousand years of power,
The struggle of two laws,
The rule of iron and spilled blood,
The abiding solidarity of living blood and brain.
They are trapped, beleaguered, murderous,
If they line their cellars with cork
It is not to still the pistol shots,
It is to insulate the last words of the condemned.
“Liberty is the mother
Not the daughter of order.”
“Not the government of men
But the administration of things.”
“From each according to his ability,
Unto each according to his needs.”
We could still hear them,
Cutting steps in the blue ice of hanging glaciers,
Teetering along shattered arêtes.
The cold and cruel apathy of mountains
Has been subdued with a few strands of rope
And some flimsy iceaxes,
There are only a few peaks left.
Twenty-five years have gone since my first sweetheart.
Back from the mountains there is a letter waiting for me.
“I read your poem in the New Republic.
Do you remember the undertaker’s on the corner,
How we peeped in the basement window at a sheeted figure
And ran away screaming? Do you remember?
There is a filling station on the corner,
A parking lot where your house used to be,
Only ours and two other houses are left.
We stick it out in the noise and carbon monoxide.”
It was a poem of homesickness and exile,
Twenty-five years wandering around
In a world of noise and poison.
She stuck it out, I never went back,
But there are domestic as well as imported
Explosions and poison gases.
Dante was homesick, the Chinese made an art of it,
So was Ovid and many others,
Pound and Eliot amongst them,
Kropotkin dying of hunger,
Berkman by his own hand,
Fanny Baron biting her executioners,
Mahkno in the odor of calumny,
Trotsky, too, I suppose, passionately, after his fashion.
Do you remember?
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Do you remember the corpse in the basement?
What are we doing at the turn of our years,
Writers and readers of the liberal weeklies?

 

September 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

The Firebombers
by Anne Sexton

We are America.
We are the coffin fillers.
We are the grocers of death.
We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

The bomb opens like a shoebox.
And the child?
The child is certainly not yawning.
And the woman?
The woman is bathing her heart.
It has been torn out of her
and as a last act
she is rinsing it off in the river.
This is the death market.

America,
where are your credentials?

 

Instead of a Foreword
by Anna Akhmatova

During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear–(we all spoke in whispers there):
“Can you describe this?”
I said, “I can!”
Then something resembling a smile slopped over what had once been her face.
            1 April 1957
            Leningrad

 

Untitled
by Anna Akhmatova

What’s worse that this past century?
Dazed with sadness, anxiety,
it touches the darkest sore
and cannot heal.

Winter’s sun still shines in the West,
the city roofs bright in its rays.
Here a white house aims upward its crosses,
ravens crying out, ravens flying in.

 

An Observation
by May Sarton

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

 

from A Memory on the Eve of the Return of the U.S. Military to Subic Bay
by Patrick Rosal

from In Distrust of Merits
by Marianne Moore

 

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón (1976)

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

 

Litany for Dictatorships
by Stephen Vincent Benet (1936)

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

 

(For every U.S. mass shooting funeral)
by Stephen Vincent Benet (1936)

Bring no flowers here,
Neither of mountain nor valley,
Nor even the common flowers of the waste field
That still are free to the poor;
No wreaths upon these graves, these houseless graves;
But bring alone the powder-blackened brass
Of the shell-case, the slag of bullets, the ripped steel
And the bone-spattering lead,
Infertile, smelling acridly of death,
And heap them here, till the rustling of guns, for remembrance.

Nightmare at Noon
by Stephen Vincent Benet (1940)

The dopes who write “Jimmy’s a dope” on the tunnel walls. These are all quite safe and nothing will happen to them. Nothing will happen, of course. Go tell Frank the Yanks aren’t coming, in Union Square.

Go tell the new brokers’ story about the President. Whatever it is. That’s going to help a lot. There’s time to drink your highball—plenty of time. Go tell fire it only burns in another country, Go tell the bombers this is the wrong address, The hurricane to pass on the other side. Go tell the earthquake it must not shake the ground.

Except from Listen to the People
by Stephen Vincent Benet (1941)

A VOICE: You can’t do this to me. We got laws. We got courts. We got unions.

A VOICE: You can’t do this to me. Why, I believe in Karl Marx!

A VOICE: You can’t do this to me. The Constitution forbids it.

A VOICE: I was always glad to cooperate.

A VOICE: It looked to me like good business.

A VOICE: It looked to me like the class struggle,

A VOICE: It looked to me like peace in our time.

TOTALITARIAN VOICE:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Democracy is finished. You are finished. We are the present!

…

You mistake me.
Others have often made the same mistake
Often and often and in many countries.
I never play upon a people’s strength.
I play upon their weaknesses and Fears.
I make their doubts my allies and my spies.
I have a most convincing mask of peace
Painted by experts, for one kind of sucker,
And for another I’m a business man,
Straight from the shoulder, talking trade and markets
And much misunderstood.
I touch this man upon his pocketbook,
That man upon his hatred for his boss,
That man upon his fear.
I offer everything, for offering’s cheap.
I make no claims until I make the claims.
I’m always satisfied until I’m not
Which happens rather rapidly to those
Who think I could be satisfied with less
Than a dismembered and digested world.
My secret weapon is no secret weapon.
It is to turn all men against all men
For my own purposes. It is to use
Good men to do my work without their knowledge,
Not only the secret traitor and the spy.
It is to raise a question and a doubt
Where there was faith. It is to subjugate

Men’s minds before their bodies feel the steel.
It is to use
All envy, all despair, all prejudice
For my own work.
If you ve an envy or a prejudice
A nicely grown, well-rounded piece of hate,
I’ll play on it and use it to your ruin.
My generals are General Distrust,
General Fear, General Half-A-Heart,
General It’s-Too-Late,
General Greed and Major-General Hate,
And they go walking in civilian clothes
In your own streets and whisper in your ears.
I won’t be beaten just by sitting tight.
They tried that out in France. I won’t be beaten
By hiding in the dark and making faces,
And certainly I never will be beaten
By those who rather like my kind of world,
Or, if not like it, think that it must come,
Those who have wings and burrow in the ground.
For I’m not betting only on the tanks,
The guns, the planes, the bombers,
But on your own division and disunion.
On your own minds and hearts to let me in,
For, if that happens, all I wish for happens.
So what have you to say?
What have you got to bet against my bet?
Where’s your one voice?

 

Let Us Hold Hands
by Pat Mora

Let us now hold hands
with the Iroquois woman who slipped berries into children’s lips
while her sisters planted stars with a wooden hoe,

with the woman who rubbed warm oil into her neighbor’s feet
when Plymouth’s winter prowled and howled outside their doors,

with the woman who sewed faith into each stitch, cloth comforters
pieced to the rhythm of español for babies born al silencio, del desierto,

with the woman who seasoned soups with pepper and hope
as her days took her further from the signs of trees she loved,

with the woman who parted her parched lips and sang
for her mother when they staggered onto these shores in chains,

with the woman who trained her stubborn tongue to wrap
around that spiny language, English, to place her child in school.

Let us now hold hands with the woman
who croons to the newborn left amid orange rinds and newspaper,
who teaches grandmothers to link letters into a word,
who whispers to the woman dying with one breast,
who holds a wife whose face is more broken than any bone,
who bathes the woman found sleeping in black snow.

Let us hold hands
with the woman who holds her sister in Bosnia, Detroit, Somalia,
Jacksonville, Guatemala, Burma, Juarez, and Cincinnati,
with the woman who confronts the glare of eyes and gunbarrels,
yet rises to protest in Yoruba, English, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, Urdu.

Let us hold hands with the woman who cooks, with the woman who builds,
with the woman who cries, with the woman who laughs,
with the woman who heals, with the woman who prays,
with the woman who plants, with the woman who harvests,
with the woman who sings, with the woman whose spirits rise.

In this time that fears faith, let us hold hands.
In this time that fears the unwashed, let us hold hands.
In this time that fears age, let us hold hands.
In this time that fears touch, let us hold hands,
brown hands, trembling hands, callused hands, frail
hands, white hands, tired hands, angry hands, new
hands, cold hands, black hands, bold hands.

In town and cities and villages, mano a mano, hand in hand,
in mountains and valleys and plains,
a ring of women circling the world,
the ring strong in our joining,
around our petaled home, this earth, let us join hands.

 

On the Slain Collegians
by Herman Melville

Youth is the time when hearts are large,
And stirring wars
Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn
To the blade it draws.
If woman incite, and duty show
(Though made the mask of Cain),
Or whether it be Truth’s sacred cause,
Who can aloof remain
That shares youth’s ardor, uncooled by the
snow
Of wisdom or sordid gain?

The liberal arts and nurture sweet
Which give his gentleness to man—
Train him to honor, lend him grace
Through bright examples meet—
That culture which makes never wan
With underminings deep, but holds
The surface still, its fitting place,
And so gives sunniness to the face
And bravery to the heart; what troops
Of generous boys in happiness thus bred—
Saturnians through life’s Tempe led,
Went from the North and came from the
South,
With golden mottoes in the mouth,
To lie down midway on a bloody bed.

Woe for the homes of the North,
And woe for the seats of the South:
All who felt life’s spring in prime,
And were swept by the wind of their place and
time—
All lavish hearts, on whichever side,
Of birth urbane or courage high,
Armed them for the stirring wars—
Armed them—some to die.
Apollo-like in pride.
Each would slay his Python—caught
The maxims in his temple taught—
Aflame with sympathies whose blaze
Perforce enwrapped him—social laws,
Friendship and kin, and by-gone days—
Vows, kisses—every heart unmoors,
And launches into the seas of wars.
What could they else—North or South?
Each went forth with blessings given
By priests and mothers in the name of Heaven;
And honor in both was chief.
Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?
So be it; but they both were young—
Each grape to his cluster clung,
All their elegies are sung.

The anguish of maternal hearts
Must search for balm divine;
But well the striplings bore their fated parts
(The heavens all parts assign)—
Never felt life’s care or cloy.
Each bloomed and died an unabated Boy;
Nor dreamed what death was—thought it mere
Sliding into some vernal sphere.
They knew the joy, but leaped the grief,
Like plants that flower ere comes the leaf—
Which storms lay low in kindly doom,
And kill them in their flush of bloom.

 

The Conflict of Convictions
by Herman Melville

On starry heights
A bugle wails the long recall;
Derision stirs the deep abyss,
Heaven’s ominous silence over all.
Return, return, O eager Hope,
And face man’s latter fall.
Events, they make the dreamers quail;
Satan’s old age is strong and hale,
A disciplined captain, gray in skill,
And Raphael a white enthusiast still;
Dashed aims, at which Christ’s martyrs pale,
Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfill?

(Dismantle the fort,
Cut down the fleet–
Battle no more shall be!
While the fields for fight in æons to come
Congeal beneath the sea.)

The terrors of truth and dart of death
To faith alike are vain;
Though comets, gone a thousand years,
Return again,
Patient she stands–she can no more–
And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.

(At a stony gate,
A statue of stone,
Weed overgrown–
Long ’twill wait!)

But God his former mind retains,
Confirms his old decree;
The generations are inured to pains,
And strong Necessity
Surges, and heaps Time’s strand with wrecks.
The People spread like a weedy grass,
The thing they will they bring to pass,
And prosper to the apoplex.
The rout it herds around the heart,
The ghost is yielded in the gloom;
Kings wag their heads–Now save thyself
Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.

(Tide-mark
And top of the ages’ strike,
Verge where they called the world to come,
The last advance of life–
Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!)

Nay, but revere the hid event;
In the cloud a sword is girded on,
I mark a twinkling in the tent
Of Michael the warrior one.
Senior wisdom suits not now,
The light is on the youthful brow.

(Ay, in caves the miner see:
His forehead bears a blinking light;
Darkness so he feebly braves–
A meagre wight!)

But He who rules is old–is old;
Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold.

(Ho ho, ho ho,
The cloistered doubt
Of olden times
Is blurted out!)

The Ancient of Days forever is young,
Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;
I know a wind in purpose strong–
It spins against the way it drives.
What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?
So deep must the stones be hurled
Whereon the throes of ages rear
The final empire and the happier world.

(The poor old Past,
The Future’s slave,
She drudged through pain and crime
To bring about the blissful Prime,
Then–perished. There’s a grave!)

Power unanointed may come–
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Agee after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);

And death be busy with all who strive–
Death, with silent negative.

YEA, AND NAY–
EACH HATH HIS SAY;
BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.
NONE WAS BY
WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;
WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.

 

Hymn
by Sherman Alexie
New! Read it here.

 

Unintitled
by Duoduo

Thousands of images have suddenly brightened in the
emptiness
the hope of freedom has been given over to cultivation
dreams have been carried off,
the serenity of the night is shattered.
Not even a mountain will be moved any more,
only the train, like a nerve, electric with anxiety,
moves forward blindly
towards the deeply buried city of memory…

Things past have constantly slipped into silence
while those dreams set out in books
and the principles of the sun’s impartial ray’s survive.
Before, they appeared subjective, and were lost
in the immortal graveyard of time.
Still, today, we have only the many worlds
as always, serenely, secretly
spinning, behind the high wall,
the web of their hidden agenda.

Translated by Gregory Lee and John Cayley

 

Civilian and Soldier
by Wole Soyinka

My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, ‘I am a civilian.’ It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.

You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your training sessions, cautioning –
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth
From the lead festival of your more eager friends
Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.

I hope some day
Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair
With meat and bread, a gourd of wine
A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question – do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?

from “Revelation in the Mother Lode”
by George Evans (Vietnam veteran)

from “Revelation in the Mother Lode”
by George Evans (Vietnam veteran)

How did it come to be that my generation would be stiff
under hoarfrost, and that I should come across them
twenty years after watching them die to remember and feel
I’ve truly wasted my time, have left no mark upon the earth
in their name, have left only the small craters of a boot
sucking vineyard mud.

And is this guilt, or the product of being swept up
in a time on human earth when few do more than raise
the cause of their own names–and am I one, or is all this
death just sloth which one pretends
to work against the belly of
but which in fact controls?

…

How tired I am of hearing about that war,
which one should struggle
to keep the nightmare of, suffer from rather than forget.
I don’t want to heal, and am sick of those who do.
Such things end in license.

Back here it turns out newspapers
and monuments are taxidermy;
there is little retribution, little learning what is lost
is forgotten; sometimes it gets so bad I’m not sure
I’m the one who lived…then come upon you in a field
–a one-time soldier with a trick knee, flagging humor,
monsoon debt–and find you enfolded by fog as if by spirits,
and become the visage of all that’s been
thrown from the world.

 

from “Eye Blade”
by George Evans

The Wall, the black wall rising. Dead list
in the capital, black list, stone mirror
faces float across searching its columns,
names to touch, lean upon and fall through
into space. Rolling stone which will not roll.
Wound which doesn’t close except in sleep.
Numbers small for war, somehow unforgivable
for something perceived as error, though all
battle is an error. And when its shine dulls,
its sting fades, and those who weep go dry,
what good will be a wall?

 

Oppression
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Is a question of strength,
of unshed tears,
of being trampled under,

and always, always,
remembering you are human.

Look deep to find the grains
of hope and strength,
and sing, my brothers and sisters,

and sing. The sun will share
your birthdays with you behind bars,
the new spring grass

like fiery spears will count your years,
as you start into the next year;
endure my brothers, endure my sisters.

 

from Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
…

And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 

The Flag of Chile
by Teresa de Jesus

Chile’s flag has three colors.
Everyone knows it
and so do I.
It has three colors and a star.
Everyone knows it
and so do I.

The white certainly expresses
hunger; with mask, and without,
huger disguised
and in civvies.

Everyone knows it
and so do I.

The blue represents neurosis
assembled minute by minute
and at the end of each month, confirmed
by an assassin over the blue.

Everyone knows it
and so do I.

The red wears away in waves
of blood, of torture and pain,
the red flames in poppies
opened by gunshots,
the red rises from tombs.

Everyone knows it
and so do I.

Translated by Maria Proser, Arlene Scully and James Scully

 

Before the Scales, Tomorrow
by Otto Castillo

And when the enthusiastic
story of our time
is told,
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
–those who have suffered most from it.

And that
being ahead of your time
means much suffering from it.
But it’s beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.

And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it’s all still so cold,
so dark.

Translated by Barbara Paschke and David Volpendestaa

 

Apolitical Intellectuals
by Otto Rene Castillo

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with “the idea
of the nothing”
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.

They won’t be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward’s death.

They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.

On that day
the simple men will come.

Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they’ll ask:

“What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?”

Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.

Your own misery
will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.

Translated by Margaret Randall

 

Distances
by Otto Rene Castillo

Under the bitter December air
a friend says
“I’m disillusioned. Everything goes
so slowly. The dictatorship is strong.
I’m desperate and pained
by the calvary of my people.”

And I, sensing his anguish, the gray
and noble sadness of my friend,
knowing his fight
to keep on fighting,
do not say: coward or go to the mountains
or lazy or pessimist,
rigid, poor devil.

I only put my arm around his shoulder,
so the tearing cruelty of his cold
be less.

…

Someone hums the national Anthem.
in the street. I get up
and look from the window
of the house where I live now.
He who sings is barefoot.
Surely also without breakfast.
He is a hawker of lies
morning
and afternoon.
Fifteen years at best.
Fifteen years of misery, I bet on that.
And from his hoarse throat,
like a Greek god well fed,
emerges the National Anthem of Guatemala.
If I hadn’t seen it, surely
I’d have said: “A soldier singing.”

Translated by Margaret Randall

 

from Love Poem
by

….those who got drunk and wept for the national anthem
under a Pacific cyclone or up north in the snow,
the spongers, beggars, pot-heads,
the stupid sons of whores,
those who were barely able to get back,
those who had a little more luck,
the forever undocumented,
those who do anything, sell anything, eat anything,
the first ones to pull a knife,
the wretched the most wretched of the earth,
my compatriots,
my brothers.

Translated by Richard Schaaf

from In Trying Times
by Heberto Padilla

They asked him for his breast, heart, his shoulders.
They told him
that that was absolutely necessary.
they explained to him later
that all this gift would be useless
unless he turned his tongue over to them,
because in trying times
nothing is so useful in checking hatred or lies.
and finally they begged him,
please, to go take a walk.
Because in trying times
that is, without a doubt, the decisive test.

Translated by Alastair Reid

Sometimes I Plunge Into the Ocean
by Heberto Padilla

Sometimes I plunge into the ocean, for a long time,
and emerge suddenly grasping, breathing
and swim as far as I can from the coast
and see the distant blurred line of the shore
and the sun making the oily water boil.
The shoreline drowns in the vapor
and I close my eyes blinded by the the light.
Then, a handsbreadth from those waves, the country appears
that for so long we thought
we were carrying on our shoulders: white, like a warship,
shining against the sun and against poets.

Translated by Alastair Reid

 

from The Dictators
Pablo Neruda  

Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

from The Tyrant
by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Mine is the new religion, the new morality.
Mine are the new laws, and a new dogma.
From now on the priests in God’s temple
will touch their lips to the hands of idols.
Proud men, tall as Cypress trees, will bend
to lick the dwarves’ feet and taste the clay.

On this day all over earth the door
of beneficent deeds is bolted.
Every gate of prayer throughout heaven
is slammed shut today.

Translated by Naomi Lazard

 

Once Again the Mind
Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Today, as usual, the mind goes hunting for a word,
one filled with venom, a word
sultry with honey, heavy with love,
smashing with fury.
The word of love must be brilliant as a glance
which greets the eye like a kiss on the lips,
bright as a summer river, its surface streaming gold,
joyous as the moment when the beloved enters
for the appointed meeting.

The word of rage must be a ferocious blade
that brings down for all time the oppressor’s citadel.
The word must be dark as the night of a crematorium;
if I bring it to my lips
it will blacken them forever.

Today every instrument is forsaken by its melody,
and the singer’s voice goes searching for its singer.
Today the chords of every harp are shredded
like a madman’s shirt. Today
the people beg each gust of wind
to bring any sound at all, even a lamentation,
even a scream of anguish,
or the last trump crying the hour of doom.

Translated by Naomi Lazard

from Last Stop
by George Seferis 

And if I talk to you in fables and parables
it’s because it’s more gentle for you that way, and horror
really can’t be talked about because it’s alive,
because it’s mute and goes on growing

…

To speak of heroes to speak of heroes: Michael
who left the hospital with his wounds still open,
perhaps he was speaking of heroes–that night
he dragged his foot through the darkened city–
when he howled, groping over our pain: “We advance in the dark,
we move forward in the dark…”
Heroes move forward in the dark.

 

Vowel
by Nina Cassian

A clean vowel
is my morning,
Latin pronunciation
in the murmur of confused time.
With rational syllables
I’m trying to clear the occult mind
and promiscuous violence.
My linguistic protest
has no power.
The enemy is illiterate.

Translated by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant

 

from What I Saw
by Zbigniew Herbert

I saw prophets tearing at their pasted-on beards
I saw imposters joining sects of flagellants
butchers disguised in sheepskin
who fled the anger of the people
playing on a block-flute

 

Children of the Epoch
Wislawa Szymborska

We are children of the epoch.
The epoch is political.

All my daily and nightly affairs,
all your daily and nightly affairs,
are political affairs.

Whether you want it or not,
your genes have a political past,
you skin has a political tone,
your eyes a political color,
What you say resounds,
what you don’t say is also
politically significant.

Even coming through the rye,
you walk with political steps
on political ground.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and in the sky there’s a moon
that’s no longer moonlike.
To be or not to be, that is a question.
Oh darling, what a question, give a suggestion.
A political question.

You don’t have to be human
to acquire a political meaning.
It’s enough to be petroleum,
cattle fodder, raw material.
Or just a conference table whose shape
was disputed for months.

In the meantime, people were killed.
Animals died,
houses burned,
fields grew wild,
as in distant
and less political epochs.

Translated by Grazyna Drabik and Austin Flint

 

Tomorrow the Past Comes
Ion Caraion

No longer for me is there anything late. All is late.
The blood runs like a subway through capitals.
And the past          is              everywhere         like the blood.

                        In the sunrise of the rivers red

with lightning                  and croups           of centaurs

there was a kind of light—I don’t know what kind of light that was.

                                            In the fog much becomes clear.

Translated by Dorian and Elliott R. Urdang

 

from Dedication
by Czeslaw Milosz

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

Warsaw, 1945

 

from Child of Europe
by Czeslaw Milosz

Grow your tree of falsehood from a single grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.

Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself
So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.

…

Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words.
Consign clear words to lexical limbo.

Judge no words before the clerks have checked
In their card index by whom they were spoken.

…

The laughter born of the love of truth
Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.

Gone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock.
The sensible monarch with false courtly phrases.

Stern as befits the servants of a cause

Translated by Jan Darowski

 

Pigtail
by Tadeusz Różewicz

When all the women in the transport
had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass
the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light
is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips

In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated
and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
pulled at school
by naughty boys.

Translated by Adam Czerniawski

 

What Happens
by Tadeusz Różewicz

It has happened
and it goes on happening
and will happen again
if nothing happens to stop it

The innocent know nothing
because they are too innocent
and the guilty know nothing
because they are too guilty

The poor do not notice
because they are too poor
and the rich do not notice
because they are too rich

The stupid shrug their shoulders
because they are too stupid
and the clever shrug their shoulders
because they are too clever

The young do not care
because they are too young
and the old do not care
because they are too old

That is why nothing happens
to stop it
and that is why it has happened
and goes on happening and will happen again.

Translated by Robert A. Maguire and Magnus Jan Krynski

Questions About Poetry Since Auschwitz
by Tadeusz Różewicz

Whether it rose up as a small brown bird
out of the smoke of cremation ovens
and then rested in one of the birches
of Birkenau

whether it flew closer
drawn by the screams of the girls
and saw them raped
and then sang

to the dust of the ruined cities
its song of quiet love
and to the starving
the lay of the ripening corn

whether it grew up in the shadow of money
and lent it its voice
for money had grown too big
to be able to jingle

whether it flew through the world
and learned its sense of beauty
from the vivid colours
of bodies torn to pieces

from the bright flames of village huts
or from the glint
of the changing daylight
in glazed eyes

whether at last in a tree
stripped by defoliants
it built its nest of hair
of paper shreds of rags and bloody feathers

and now waits for mating
for the time to sit on its eggs
and for the hatching of
its eternally innocent young

that only lyric poets know
who steadfastly call
for wild bird protection
in a world soon to be whole again

Translated by Robert A. Mcguire and Mangus Jan Krynski

 

One Kind of Freedom Speaks
by Erich Fried

Those who loved freedom
got me with their sweat
in the sleepless nights
of their dungeons and dingy rooms

Those who loved freedom
fed me with their blood
taught me to stand and walk
on their bones

Those who loved freedom
called me to the capital
bore me into the palace
placed me on the throne

Now I am free
to rule in their spirit
I stick very closely
to what they taught me

I still tread their bones
underfoot
I still drink the blood
of those who loved freedom.

Translated by Georg Rapp

 

Ultima Ratio Reagan
by Howard Nemerov

The reason we do not learn from history is
Because we are not the people who learned last time.

Because we are not the same people as them
That fed our sons and honor to Vietnam
And dropped the burning money on their trees,

We know that we know better than they knew,
And history will not blame us if once again
The light at the end of the tunnel is the train.

 

Saul Bellow from Literary Notes on Khrushchev

“Instead of having been punished for his crimes, he has become a great leader, which persuades him that life is inherently dramatic. And in his joy at having reversed the moral-accounting system of bourgeois civilization, he plays his role with ever greater spirit.”

 

Riddle
by Jericho Brown

We do not recognize the body
Of Emmett Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
We do not know the history
Of ourselves in this nation. We
Do not know the history of our
Selves on this planet because
We do not have to know
What we believe we own. We believe
We own your bodies but have no
Use for your tears. We destroy
The body that refuses use. We use
Maps we did not draw. We see
A sea so cross it. We see a moon
So land there. We love land so
Long as we can take it. Shhh. We
Can’t take that sound. What is
A mother wailing? We do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it. We sell what cannot be
Bought. We buy silence. Let us
Help you. How much does it cost
To hold your breath underwater?
Wait. Wait. What are we? What?
What? What on Earth are we?

 

Part V of The Trolls
(Written after an air-raid, April 1941)
Louis MacNeice

This then is our answer under
The crawl of lava, a last
Shake of the fist at the vanishing sky, at the hulking
Halfwit demons who rape and slobber, who assume
That when we are killed no more will be heard of us-
Silence of men and trolls’ triumph.
A wrong— in the end— assumption.
Barging and lunging out of the clouds, a daft
Descent of no-good gods, they think to
Be rid for ever of the voice of men but they happen
To be trying what even trolls
Can never accomplish, they happen
To be — for all their kudos-
Wrong, wrong in the end.

 

The World’s One Hope
by Bertolt Brecht

1.
Is oppression as old as the moss around ponds?
The moss around ponds is not avoidable.
Perhaps everything I see is natural, and I am sick and want to remove what cannot be removed?
I have read songs of the Egyptians, of their men who built the pyramids. They complained of their loads and asked when oppression would cease. That’s four thousand years ago.
Oppression, it would seem, is like the moss and unavoidable.

2.
When a child is about to be run down by a car one pulls it on to the pavement.
Not the kindly man does that, to whom they put up monuments.
Anyone pulls the child away from the car. But here many have been run down, and many pass by and do nothing of the sort.
Is that because it’s so many who are suffering? Should one not help them all the more because they are many? One helps them less. Even the kindly walk past and after that are as kindly as ever they were before walking past.

3.
The more there are suffering, then, the more natural their sufferings appear. Who wants to prevent the fishes in the sea from getting wet?
And the suffering themselves share this callousness towards themselves and are lacking in kindness towards themselves.
It is terrible that human beings so easily put up with existing conditions, not only with the sufferings of strangers but also with their own.
All those who have thought about the bad state of things refuse to appeal to the compassion of one group of people for another. But the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable.
It is the world’s one hope.

When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain
by Bertolt Brecht

Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office hours: the counter is already closed.

Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks another language. They do not understand him.

Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at a door where he has four times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry.

Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.

So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become endurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

 

The God of War
by Bertolt Brecht

I saw the old god of war stand in a bog between chasm and rockface.

He smelled of free beer and carbolic and showed his testicles to adolescents, for he had been rejuvenated by several professors. In a hoarse, wolfish voice he declared his love for everything young. Nearby stood a pregnant woman, trembling.

And without shame he talked on and presented himself as a great one for order. And he described how everywhere he put barns in order, by emptying them.

And as one throws crumbs to sparrows, he fed poor people with crusts of bread which he had taken away from poor people.

His voice was now loud, now soft, but always hoarse.

In a loud voice he spoke of great times to come, and in a soft voice he taught the women how to cook crows and seagulls. Meanwhile, his back was unquiet, and he kept looking round, as though afraid of being stabbed.

And every five minutes he assured his public that he would take up very little of their time.

 

Epitaph on a Tyrant
by W.H.Auden (1939)

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

 

Good Bones
by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

The Death of Captain America
by James Arthur

Cap will be buried in his costume, in his half-mask,
with his bulletproof shield of blue, red, and white,
and the Invincible Iron Man is inconsolable,
now that Captain America is dead.

If the man inside the coffin was a symbol, what ideals
did he represent? Did he believe in the right to bear arms,
or in big government? Was he disfigured from battle?
Did he have a schoolboy’s face?
For some, he was an authoritarian endowed with physical grace,
but this morning even the paparazzi
seem moved by the manly grief of the mighty Thor.
What will become of the Pax Americana
now that Captain America is dead?

If he stormed the beach at Normandy
was he in the shadows at the hanging of Saddam Hussein?
Cap’s enemy the kingpin is here,
leaning on a diamond-encrusted cane.
Cap never drank, never smoked, was straight
as a bug-collector’s pin,
but many a crooked man will walk a crooked mile
now that Captain America is dead.

The escalator’s been broken since August.
The drinking fountain is full of cement.
Will the train stations descend into ruin
now that Captain America is dead?

Some people want a moral. Some, only a refrain.
Some want to go on injuring themselves
in the way they have
time and again,
but who will speak for the man inside the coffin–
his love of slapstick, his wide-open grin?
Will anyone speak of the man himself,
remembering what was best and worst in him?

Into the ground, the indestructible shield,
the myth, the one-man legion. Into the ground,
the man, the boy, and every toy or comic book
that ever pleased him. Into the ground.
Into the ground. Into the ground.
Captain America is dead.

 

from I Was Washing Outside in the Darkness
by Osip Mandelstam

The gate’s locked,
the land’s grim as its conscience.
I don’t think they’ll find the new weaving,
finer than truth, anywhere.

Star-salt is melting in the barrel,
icy water is turning blacker,
death’s growing purer, misfortune saltier,
the earth’s moving nearer to truth and to dread.

 

The Stalin Epigram
by Osip Mandelstam

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

 

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

Part 1 from Differences of Opinion
by Wendy Cope

He Tells Her

He tells her that the earth is flat–
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

 

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
by W.B. Yeats (1913)

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor’s eyes. . . .

 

Villanelle for America
by Katie Bickham (2016)

The American machine is far from broken,
but grinding bones the way it was designed.
No quiet now will hush the thing we’ve woken.

We try to pray, to pledge, to scream, but choke in
terror of the ledge we teeter on. Resigned,
we whisper low, America the Broken

come crown thy good with thorns, an oaken
anthem like a cage. We have been blind
and deaf to this red thing we’ve woken.

Wake up. While you were sleeping, hate has spoken
its own name and named us too, in kind.
The American machine is well-oiled, broken

in by centuries of bigots armed and cloaked in
stars and stripes. The flag sags in the wind,
rung out and hung to dry by what we’ve woken.

I voted today, protected what I could. The token
clanged in the machine. The man standing behind
me would undo it. Send your tired, your broken
somewhere else. Tell them to run from what we’ve woken.

 

Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Hope is the thing with feathers
by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

 

Wont You Celebrate With Me
by Lucille Clifton

 won’t you celebrate with me
what I have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and failed.

 

Genesis
by Mary Ruefle

Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.

 

from The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.