I am a great inventor, did you but know it. I have new weapons and explosives and devices to substitute for your obsolete tactics and tools. Mine are the battle-ships of righteousness and integrity— The armor-plates of a quiet conscience and self-respect— The impregnable conning-tower of divine manhood— The Long Toms of persuasion— The machine guns of influence and example— The dum-dum bullets of pity and remorse— The impervious cordon of sympathy— The concentration camps of brotherhood— The submarine craft of forgiveness— The torpedo-boat-destroyer of love— And behind them all the dynamite of truth! I do not patent my inventions. Take them. They are free to all the world.
This poem is in the public domain.
A Colonial Custom Bathsheba came out to the sun, Out to our wallèd cherry-trees; The tears adown her cheek did run, Bathsheba standing in the sun, Telling the bees. My mother had that moment died; Unknowing, sped I to the trees, And plucked Bathsheba’s hand aside; Then caught the name that there she cried Telling the bees. Her look I never can forget, I that held sobbing to her knees; The cherry-boughs above us met; I think I see Bathsheba yet Telling the bees.
This poem is in the public domain.
Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they smell,
And never sit when you say sit,
Or even when you yell.
And when you come home late at night
And there is ice and snow,
You have to go back out because
The dumb dog has to go.
Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they shed,
And always let the strangers in
And bark at friends instead,
And do disgraceful things on rugs,
And track mud on the floor,
And flop upon your bed at night
And snore their doggy snore.
Mother doesn't want a dog.
She's making a mistake.
Because, more than a dog, I think
She will not want this snake.
From If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries . . ., published by Macmillan, 1981. Used with permission.
America I was I think I was
Seven I think or anyway I prob-
ably was nine I anyway was nine
And riding in the back seat of our tan
Datsun 210 which by the way Amer-
ica I can’t believe Datsun is just
Gone anyway America I was
Riding in the back seat we were we my grand-
mother and I were passing the it must
Have been a mall but I have tried and can’t
Remember any malls in Austin at
The time America but do I really
Remember Austin really I remember
This thing that happened once when I was passing
A mall in Austin so the mall so Austin
But then and when America will my
Grandmother be my memories of her her-
self be replaced by memories of just
Her presence near important or unusu-
al things that happened does that happen will
That happen we America we were
Anyway passing on a city street
But next to it the mall and actually
I might have been in the front seat actually
And maybe it was winter all the windows
Were rolled up maybe or at least the one
Right next to me in the front seat Amer-
ica when for no reason I could see the
Window exploded glass swallowed me the way
A cloudburst swallows a car glass and a
Great stillness flying glass and stillness both
Together then the stillness left and I
Jumped either over my seat or between
The seats into the back America
Or neither here I might just be remem-
bering the one real accident I’ve ever
Been in I was a child still maybe seven
Or nine and we were in an intersec-
tion hit and I for sure jumped then my grand-
mother and I again already my
Memories of the Datsun breaking seem
More solid than my memories of her
America but I remember her
Mobile home filling up with trash until
She couldn’t walk through any room and still she
Walked through her rooms she walked the way I walk
Through stores suspicious and aloof watched e-
ven by the products I consume consumed
By you America O cloud of glass
Copyright © 2018 Shane McCrae. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Tin House, Summer 2018.
In Iraq,
after a thousand and one nights,
someone will talk to someone else.
Markets will open
for regular customers.
Small feet will tickle
the giant feet of the Tigris.
Gulls will spread their wings
and no one will fire at them.
Women will walk the streets
without looking back in fear.
Men will give their real names
without putting their lives at risk.
Children will go to school
and come home again.
Chickens in the villages
won’t peck at human flesh
on the grass.
Disputes will take place
without any explosives.
A cloud will pass over cars
heading to work as usual.
A hand will wave
to someone leaving
or returning.
The sunrise will be the same
for those who wake
and those who never will.
And every moment
something ordinary
will happen
under the sun.
Copyright © 2014 by Dunya Mikhail. From The Iraqi Nights (New Directions, 2014), translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.
It’s true I never loved my country
in the abstract sense: red, white, or blue.
I have only this black waving flag,
my disposition.
Stars, bold stripes,
remind me of a million dead young men
in far-off ditches,
remind me of the innocents who fell,
collaterally damaged,
wild-eyed, blazing: each of them
a universe unmade.
I say that I have never loved my country,
but I’d surely die
for several good friends, my wife and sons.
I’d sacrifice a number of pink toes
and fingers, too (my own)
for Emerson, for Whitman and Thoreau.
I’d give an eye for one deep lake,
for several good streams,
at least one waterfall,
a lovely stand of Norway pines
just east of here, not far away.
From New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 by Jay Parini (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
Stumble to silence, all you uneasy things, That pack the day with bluster and with fret. For here is music at each window set; Here is a cup which drips with all the springs That ever bud a cowslip flower; a roof To shelter till the argent weathers break; A candle with enough of light to make My courage bright against each dark reproof. A hand’s width of clear gold, unraveled out The rosy sky, the little moon appears; As they were splashed upon the paling red, Vast, blurred, the village poplars lift about. I think of young, lost things: of lilacs; tears; I think of an old neighbor, long since dead.