Betsy Sholl: Monet’s Garden
When he was painting his lilies,
when he was refusing evacuation
despite the war being close enough
to hear from his garden,
was Monet offering the world lilies,
saying there are lilies as well as guns?
Amy Lowell: Dreams in War Time
I dug a grave under an oak-tree.
With infinite care, I stamped my spade
Into the heavy grass.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: The Worlds in this World
Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide recedes,
incense is lit, an infant sucks from a nipple,
a grenade shrieks, a man buys his first cane.
T.S. Eliot: Rhapsody on a Windy Night
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things
Abby Zimet: Ukraine’s Battle of the Somme
Putin’s bloody debacle in Ukraine reflects a system “in which medievalism meets Stalinism meets dark farce.”
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
Edward Harkness: My Father’s Uncles Doing Time
Their sorry, sorry asses. Bad year, 1929.
Neither one is yet 30 in the grim prison photos
I received from the state archives.
Rajan Menon: The Economic Consequences of the War
The conflict in Ukraine Is a disaster for the poor of this planet.
Kimberly Parish Davis: The Messenger
When he came to the bottom of his street he could hear the screams. Chaos unfolded before him. Houses were burning and women were running hunched over as they tried to protect their children. Soldiers on horseback ran them down, shooting and slashing and impaling people indiscriminately.
Video: Paths of Glory | How Corrupt Leaders Destroy Our Humanity (& Good Ones Fight For It)
Humanity fluctuates with power, morality, and truth. There’s more than one way to be objectified.
Charlotte Mew: The Cenotaph
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed
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.
Siegfried Sassoon: Grandeur of Ghosts
How can they use such names and be not humble?
I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered.
