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.
Sandy Solomon: On “Adlestrop”
“Adlestrop” is a poem which, though written in a time of war, takes place during that last, long, beautiful Edwardian summer. The speaker is describing a prewar train journey in full consciousness of the disruption that is soon to follow.
Matthew Hollis: Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war
When Thomas and Frost met in London in 1913, neither had yet made his name as a poet. They became close, and each was vital to the other’s success. But then Frost wrote ‘The Road Not Taken’, which brought Thomas to an irreversible decision.
Edward Thomas: Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Vox Populi 