Carlene M. Gadapee: Give Peace a Chance
The Burning World by Sherod Santos is a complicated and arresting mytho-historical and contemporary narrative demonstrating the pain of war and conflict.
Video: Suheir Hammad | Poems of war, peace, women, power
Poet Suheir Hammad performs two spine-tingling spoken-word pieces: Wait for the astonishing line: “Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded.”
Rupert Brooke: The Fish
O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Kathryn Levy: At the End of the World
she keeps washing the dishes—they
have to be clean for the
dinners of tomorrow—
and watching explosions
in some distant country
Mike Schneider: Spring Mills
Stars & stripes ripple from the pole.
An old willow leans over the water,
strand after strand of green tears.
Kim Stafford: Top Hit
But comrades, if we kill him, someone will make
a martyr song and it will become the anthem sung
by thousands in the streets
Rachel Hadas: ‘Laugh right in its face’ – a poet reflects on her craft’s defiant role in the middle of a war
Poets write poetry to help them come to terms with the terror of their times. The process of writing those poems, and the process of reading them, both offer respite.
Richard Hoffman: The Road
the groves and orchards
poisoned, fathers and brothers tortured,
hope abandoned with the other heavy furniture
it isn’t much of a road, the future
Kim Stafford: Four poems about the current war
How much rain to fill the Volga?
Not soon, the end of weeping.
Edwin Muir: The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence
James Dubinsky: Veterans turned poets can help bridge divides
Today, there are approximately 20.17 million veterans – 7 percent of the U.S. population. That’s more than 20 million stories, along with the stories of their loved ones. Sometimes poetry is the most effective way to capture both the ambiguity and the story.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle): The Walls Do Not Fall
tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,
yet the frame held:
we passed the flame: we wonder
what saved us? what for?
Siegfried Sassoon: ‘The Hero’
The cruelty in this poem is overwhelming – as Sassoon intended. So opposed was he to jingoistic propaganda, he deliberately slashed very tender imagery with the sharpest irony.
Henry Beston: A Year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.
Vox Populi 