Vox Populi
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Philip Levine: Belle Isle, 1949
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I’d never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.
Copyright 1999 Philip Levine. From They Feed They Lion and The Names of the Lost (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
Included in Vox Populi for educational purposes only.
Philip Levine (1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
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What Work Is was one of my favorite books when I was a young poet and it remains astonishing ❤️
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Yes, Phil remains one of our most important poets.
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Phil Levine is one of my top 10 poets. I never, *never*, tire of reading his work.
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Oh, Laure-Anne, how nice to see you on these pages again! Yes, Phil Levine is one of our best poets. No one else captures the life of industrial workers and their families as well as he did
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I was away for a while, dear Mike. All’s well — happy to be back!
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The real baptism… and it can be enacted more than once.
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Well, what to say, except, of course, Philip Levine!
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Probably my all time favorite poet and this was i believe the first poem of his I read. Still totally love it
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So great!
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Yes, Levine wrote some of our best poems about working class life.
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